Restless Gossamers
by nowforruin
Summary: "Eleanor has never been kissed like this, as though the storm outside has come indoors to drown her where she stands, and the longer it goes on, her breaths growing shorter, her cheeks burning with the scrape of his stubble, the less she ever wants it to stop." Canon compliant through 308...and then I fixed it. Eleanor / Vane.
1. Chapter 1

New project!

* * *

His name is already a powerful thing the first time their eyes lock across the beach.

He's young. His shoulders have yet to broaden into the form of a man, the muscle lining his arms lithe and sinewy, but it doesn't stop him from striding through the shallows with the confidence of a man twice his age, swaggering down the sands amidst his crew. If the rumors are to be believed, he'll be the youngest quartermaster Nassau has ever seen.

And he knows it.

Even at thirteen, she's drawn to him. She's made it her business to know the politics of the island, to learn the crews and the ships and the captains. She's old enough to recognize her abilities already exceed her father's. Mr. Scott knows it too, if only he weren't so bound by fucking propriety to admit it.

Charles Vane doesn't give a shit about propriety.

Of all the eyes on the beach on him, hers are the ones he meets. Her breath catches, but she's already learning to control her reactions, so she lifts her chin and refuses to blink, because Eleanor Guthrie will be queen of this place one day and she bows to no one.

She expects him to look away first, to return to the merriment of the crew flush with what must be a hefty prize – if the mood of the men spilling onto the beach is any indication – but he lets the men go ahead of him and stays where he is. His brow lifts in challenge, his thumb hooking into his sword belt, and she's old enough to recognize the way his hips push slightly forward as his stance widens, his boots planted in the sand.

Control – men like him are all about it. Control over crews, control over the beach, control over women.

But if her father can't control her, Eleanor isn't about to let some pirate manchild do it either. So despite the fact that she is standing in the middle of the camps, a girl already growing into the curves of womanhood and all the attention that comes with it, she doesn't move. She watches Charles Vane, watches the sunlight glint in the metal woven through his braids, watches his fingers curl around the hilt of his sword – and doesn't give a shit if he knows it.

His expression flickers from curiosity to amusement, his lips curving into a smirk. But when she doesn't smirk back, when she merely holds his gaze with a tiny, goading smile, his amusement turns to annoyance, the already famous glower settling into his sharp cheekbones and slitted eyes. Still, Eleanor stands her ground, the rest of the beach fading from her consciousness until there is only the steely blue glare of Charles Vane to contend with, a battle she is now determined to win waging between them.

She is not afraid of him – not him, not Flint, not Teach. For as stupid as the men who roam the beach are, the ones who lead them are _not_ stupid. They understand that without the Guthrie Trading Company, the entire island goes to shit. So they won't touch her, and if their men know what's good for them, they won't either.

In the end, she wins because his friend tugs his elbow, thrusting a bottle of rum into his hands, and he's forced to look away to deal with the tall, gangly boy at his side. She's adept enough at body language that she doesn't need to hear the _fuck you_ that must leave his lips, and only then, his attention fully diverted, does she allow herself a small, satisfied laugh.

It's but another moment before the third of the trio makes an appearance, red hair bright under the merciless sun where it tumbles out from beneath a floppy, beaten leather hat. She's heard of that one too – Anne Bonny, a girl two years older than Eleanor herself, but with a ruthless reputation to accompany that of her friends.

And Eleanor wonders, not for the first time, what it would be like to be so utterly free. To step on board a pirate ship, to need no protection other than her own abilities – to be an equal to a pirate such as Charles Vane. But as quickly as the thought flits through her mind, she brushes it aside. Already she is learning the fruitlessness of desiring that which she cannot have, and instead turns her attention to obtainable quarry.

No, she will never rule Nassau from the bay – she will never be feared for her talent with a blade, but she will bring this island to heel. This place is in her blood in a way it's never been in her father's, and she will endure when he is finally run off by his own incompetence and weak mind.

-x-

It's hard to tell who is toying with who as the months go on. Eleanor wanders into the camps whenever it pleases her, Mr. Scott's admonishments and lectures ignored. There is something far more appealing about the honesty of the pirates, with their coarse language and blatant stares, than the rather irritating chess match she's been continuously engaging her father in.

Really, it should be more difficult to move the pieces about the board, but as thirteen gives way to fourteen, Eleanor begins to perfect her skills of manipulation. She plants the seeds of doubt in her father's competence, but never enough to sabotage the business completely. No, she has no problem rebuilding the mess he is sure to leave, but there is only so much ruin she can come back from. She's not stupid enough to burn the whole thing to the ground, but she knows her father, and she knows he will run at the first sign of smoke.

So rather than play the proper little lady, she roams the camps. She dices and she drinks and she curses as well as any of the men. It never fails to delight when she manages to surprise one of them, when she looks up from the torchlight's flickering shadows on a pitted and scarred table to find a grizzled pirate gaping at her like a fish.

She will never win this island by dicing, but she has never intended to. She uses her time in the camps to gather information. As wily as the captains are, there are few among their crews who understand the long game, who can see beyond the next prize, and those men have a habit of running their mouths the more they drink.

So Eleanor gathers their coin and their secrets from beneath her lashes, using her smiles and her brash, defiant nature to lure them into telling her all she could possibly want to know about the politics of the ships. She learns which captains succeed on sheer dumb luck, and which are power unto themselves. She learns which men command loyalty with fear, which with respect – and which with their name alone.

All the while, Charles Vane watches her.

She catches sight of him at the edge of the fires, silent, observing. It doesn't take long to sort out that he isn't terribly talkative, that his strength in some ways is not so different from hers. She is certain his two shadows, Rackham and Bonny, are also his spies. Jack gathers information by letting others believe he is a prattling fool, talking and talking and talking until the men grow so tired of the sound of his fucking voice that they forget the man is the right hand of Charles Vane, and Charles Vane is not foolish enough to keep an idiot at his side. And Bonny, well, she's a woman, and Eleanor knows just how easy it is to exploit the assumptions brought on by a pair of tits and a skirt – not that Anne would ever wear a skirt.

And Charles gathers all that information, and behind his watchful stare, she can see him plotting, planning, consolidating his power. He's quartermaster now, voted in unanimously by the men, and though he's younger than all of them, she sees the way the street gives him a wide berth.

But she also knows that as vicious as he can be, as hot as his temper blazes, the man has a purpose behind his moves, that his cruelty is just another knife he's sharpened into a formidable weapon. Like her, he is ambitious, and he refuses to be beholden to anyone save himself and, for the time being, his captain. He understands the power of his name already, understands that he can say more with a cold stare than with a tirade.

He knows that in not approaching her, he has issued a challenge. He will not speak first – he will make her come to him.

Except Eleanor knows that his new position will eventually result in him coming to _her_. At the moment, it is still her father and Mr. Scott who deal with the pirates and their hauls, but the more her father drinks, the more Mr. Scott becomes responsible for the running of things. Soon Eleanor will be positioned to do more than serve drinks in the tavern, and Charles will be forced to come to her to trade on behalf of his crew.

No more smirks from the edge of the campfires, no more laughter just over her shoulder in the tavern, no more holding her stare through a crowd of drunk men with his clear, intent gaze despite the quantity of rum he drinks – rum he always sends Jack to fetch.

So, no, she won't go to him, no matter what the weight of his stare does to her. She has grown up on an island of pirates, her father's tavern connected to a whorehouse. It is no mystery why her pulse throbs between her legs when the challenge in Vane's eyes shifts into a different sort of invitation, an invitation Eleanor might take him up on if she were a different person – or if he came to her and begged for it.

But he'll never beg, and that's precisely why she wants him.

There is also the talk of the women in the whorehouse that makes him an appealing prospect to teach her the pleasures of a man between her legs. Yes, he has earned her grudging respect, despite them never having spoken, but it also his manner of treating the women he pays for their company. The whores are some of Eleanor's greatest spies, and from them she has learned a great deal about the natures of the men they service.

But Eleanor is proud, and she is laying the foundation of an empire, so when Charles Vane stares at her, she stares back, and it is a rare thing she is the first to look away. The longer it goes on, the longer the contests last, and Eleanor doesn't give a shit who notices.

Because even though this game between them is sure to become personal, it is also good business. He is only the quartermaster, not the captain, but still his name is spoken on the island with the sort of reverence Teach and Flint command. He _will_ be captain one day, and when Eleanor meets his challenge with one of her own, when she stares him down without an ounce of fear, the men and the street begin to realize the power she holds over him and the men like him.

She is a fortnight shy of sixteen when it happens, when her father departs the island in the dead of night, coward that he is, and leaves Eleanor to run the operation. Teach's crew is on a hunt, which suits her fine because when Vane saunters up to the trading desk, he has not heard that her father has departed and _she_ is now the one to set terms.

His lips curve into a smirk when he spots her, amusement dancing in his pale blue eyes. He's filthy from the weeks at sea, and a barely healed cut is still crusted with blood across his cheek, but he has all the poise of a king as he lifts an eyebrow at her.

And then he waits.

Eleanor smiles pleasantly, leaning forward, knowing her shirt will gape, knowing from the way his eyes scour her body that it will draw his attention, but she doesn't speak.

"Have you business to discuss, Mr. Vane?" Mr. Scott's voice is thick with displeasure, and Eleanor knows there will be a price to pay for this display with the quartermaster, but in the moment she is content with the rush of victory, because now she has won.

After all their silent games, he has finally come to her.

To his credit, Vane sorts the situation for himself in a moment, his eyes narrowing as they dart from Mr. Scott to Eleanor. He doesn't give her the satisfaction of showing his surprise, and as they enter into the business at hand, he displays nothing but an infuriating amusement tugging at the edge of his mouth, his eyes raking over her body as blatantly in the noonday sun as they have in the camps where the shadows have hidden him.

"Pleasure doing business, Miss Guthrie," he drawls before he leaves, his rich voice a rumble over her skin. Another quartermaster waits behind him, but still he lingers, that damn smirk playing over his lips. "Until next time."

She watches him go, ignoring Mr. Scott's poor attempt at subtlety with his fake cough. It is only after the next prize is processed and the credit issued that Mr. Scott all but drags her further into the warehouse, out of sight of the men.

"I caution you not to trifle with Charles Vane, Eleanor." His voice is low, his brows furrowed and his fingers tight around her arms, holding her in place despite her attempt to shrug him off. "You are not invincible. He is one of the most dangerous men on this island."

"I know," she snaps, finally managing to shake him off. She levels him with her coldest glare, waiting for him to look away before she marches back to the tavern. No other ships are due back on the beach today, and the tavern will want tending as the two crews stream in.

She doesn't tell Mr. Scott she is perfectly aware of how dangerous Vane is – that it is his danger that makes him a suitable candidate for her plans. She is not naive enough to believe she will be able to rule this place with no one but Mr. Scott and her father's name to defend her, not yet. They have no reason to fear her, no reason beyond their ability to remember they rely on her trade to prosper, and that is a fact easily forgotten with enough rum and male posturing.

But if she can bring the meanest of them to her side, if she can conquer _him_ , then she can conquer them all. She will use him to reach her ends, and if there's a bit of fun to be had along the way, why the fuck not?

-x-

Their stalemate over first words broken, a new game begins.

Eleanor doesn't lie to herself. She knows how this will end. But how they get there will establish the rules between them and the balance of power – and Eleanor intends to hold the lion's share.

What she doesn't count on is that Vane sees through her. He recognizes what she's about, and he toys with her as she toys with him. He invades her space, his fingers brushing against her skirts, her arm, and on more than one occasion, her breasts. He doesn't care if it's in the camps or the tavern that they meet, and though he keeps their brief conversations to business, the other offer is always there, just waiting for her to ask.

The delight he takes in teasing her is obvious, and it's even more obvious he makes no attempt to hide it. He has lifted his rum to her in a mockery of a toast while using his other hand to fondle a whore, and he has stood so close to her she can smell the smoke and salt and leather of him, without saying a word.

She begins to wonder which of them will break first, how much longer it can go on, but the answer comes in a manner she never accounted for.

A storm blows into Nassau, a shipkiller that brings all the crews within sailing distance into the harbor to ride out the worst of it. It's a smart move by the captains, but with rain lashing the beach and wind howling across the bay, the men have sought shelter indoors.

These are not men used to being long indoors.

Which means Eleanor's tavern is packed to the rafters with bored, drunk pirates before midday. And by the time evening has settled in, and there aren't enough whores to go around for the men to work off their restlessness, it is inevitable that the fights break out. She does the best she can shoving them out the door and into the rain to pummel each other in the mud and not inside her place, but when she grabs one of them by the shoulder, he spins around and punches her.

It hurts, it _really_ fucking hurts, but the surprise of it gets to her more than the pain. He belongs to one of the lesser crews, and while Eleanor doesn't know his name, she knows his captain's – not that it does her any good. That crew is barely leashed at sea, and their camp is notorious for slit throats. The men are poorly disciplined, and if Eleanor could be rid of them entirely, she would. Their meager income is not worth the trouble they bring to the island, but she isn't strong enough yet to banish them.

There is blood in her mouth, and Eleanor draws herself to her full height as she narrows her eyes and spits at the man's boots, ignoring the coppery tang of blood on her tongue. "Get the fuck out," she snaps, refusing to back down as the tavern quiets, all eyes on them.

He hesitates, but then the bastard laughs at her. And she's about to open her mouth again, about to threaten him and pray he doesn't call her bluff, when she feels the heat of another man at her back, his boots heavy on the floorboards. In the space of a breath, the only sound the drumming of the rain on the roof, Eleanor realizes Vane has appeared from the shadows to stand behind her, the smoke from his cigar curling in the air, snaking around her and settling over her shoulders like armor.

She doesn't turn to look at him, doesn't acknowledge his presence. She is furious he's done it, furious he feels the need to interfere on her behalf, despite the fact that he says nothing, but she can't deny there is satisfaction in watching the other man pale and back down instantly.

The other pirate leaves with a muttered curse, but Eleanor doesn't relax, even as the roar of conversation returns to the tavern. She forces herself to breathe evenly, to hold her temper in check as she turns to confront Vane, because even if she knows she will not win with him in this moment, she will not be defeated by another man tonight.

But he's already returned to his table with his usual companions, as if he knows he's crossed a line and that to provoke her further would be unwise. And despite her desire to step into her office and shut out the racket, despite her wish to go upstairs and claim the sanctuary of her balcony to watch the storm rage without the stench of sour sweat and rum pressing in all around her, she resumes her place behind the bar and continues to pour rum as though the entire incident never occurred.

She tells herself that the game is a draw for the night, and she refrains from looking at Vane. Instead, she pours herself several measures of rum to numb the pain in her jaw, and glares at anyone who so much as dares glance at the bruise forming on her pale skin.

She knows he's still there, still feels him behind her, and when the hour grows late, she finds him alone, his boots on the table and a bottle of rum dangling from his fingers. Given the state of the storm, she doesn't bother to rouse the men who have passed out against walls and on tables, but she does set about cleaning the place up, firmly ignoring the heavy gaze of a pair of pale blue eyes.

"Eleanor."

She doesn't look at him even then, despite the fact he says her name as a lover would, a raspy caress that sends a shiver straight down her spine. Instead she snatches up the mugs left behind by Rackham and Bonny before walking away.

"You had no fucking right to interfere," she snaps when she realizes he's followed her into the galley, dumping the mugs in her hands into a wash basin. "I can handle myself."

"That so?" He arches a brow at her like he has so many other times, the light catching on the scar running through it. She has the most inexplicable urge to raise her fingers, to run them along that scar above his eye, to ask him where he got it, but instead she balls her hands into fists at her side and ignores the fact that she has a sink at her back and Charles Vane not a foot in front of her.

She doesn't have an answer, because the truth is, she doesn't know what the fuck she would have done if it wasn't for him at her back in that moment. She doesn't know how she would have made a man twice her size listen to her in the middle of a crowd of frustrated, drunk pirates, because she hasn't quite solidified her power enough to be feared.

But she'll be damned if she'll admit any of that to the man in front of her.

He takes a step closer, something shifting in his expression. It's a glimpse of the fierceness she imagines he displays on deck, and it's instinct to slap his hand away when he raises it toward the bruise on her cheek.

For some reason, that makes him smile, and his laugh washes over her, infuriates her, and she launches herself at him with a growl, her fingers curling to land a punch of her own. He sees it coming, catching her wrists and holding firm, and backs her up against the cabinets, the heat of his body seeping into hers.

"Wouldn't do that if I were you," he says quietly, a warning in his eyes even as he pushes his hips into hers to pin her in place.

"I'm not afraid of you," she snaps back, and it's not entirely true in that moment. They're alone, and he's much stronger than she is, and she is currently at his mercy.

But her words only bring the smile back to his lips, and his hold loosens slightly. "I know," he says, leaning closer, her fingers brushing against the thin, sweat-dampened shirt he wears. "You never have been."

"Don't fucking patronize me." It comes out as a snarl, and Eleanor jerks against his hold, her temper flaring. Who the fuck does he think he is, getting involved in her affairs and then lording it over her like he's done her some grand favor? And then to stand here, invading her space, and trying to tell her–

"I'm not."

His voice is low but firm, cutting into her thoughts, and when she looks up, that hint of amusement that never fails to get under her skin is gone. Something else lives in his stare, something intense and dangerously honest. There's a compliment in there somewhere, a man like him acknowledging a thing like that, and when he lets her wrists go, he doesn't back away. Instead, he slips his hand into her hair, and this time, she doesn't stop him.

And while he's careful where he puts his hand on her face, his kiss is not gentle. He's on her in an instant, unleashing his desires in a torrent of brutal kisses that are as demanding as the man himself.

Eleanor has never been kissed like this, as though the storm outside has come indoors to drown her where she stands, and the longer it goes on, her breaths growing shorter, her cheeks burning with the scrape of his stubble, the less she ever wants it to stop.

Her hands move of their own accord, clawing at him, her fingers curling around his neck to bring him closer still, and he obliges, lifting her easily to slam against the opposite wall. It's only then that he pauses, raking his gaze over her in a silent evaluation she can't quite place. And whatever it is he finds, frustration clouds his eyes, the fierce desire she saw just a moment ago shrouded.

"Fuck." His hands tighten on her thighs, but he doesn't kiss her again, and after another long moment, he eases her back to the ground.

"What are you–"

"You've never been fucked, have you?" he growls, his hands at his sides doing little to hide the tension in his chest and shoulders. He may have taken his hands off her, but he's still standing close enough that she can practically feel him vibrate with frustration.

"So?" She won't deny that he's right – Eleanor prefers brutal honesty and, when practical, applies the same standard to herself. But she won't apologize for it, won't give him the satisfaction of admitting there is an entire world she hasn't experienced for herself, and that she's chosen him as the one to show it to her.

"So I don't make a habit of fucking virgins," he snaps, turning away from her and crossing to lean back against the opposite wall, as though he can't stand to be near her in that moment.

"So? You _want_ to fuck me."

When he doesn't answer her, she squares her shoulders and marches herself right up to him, and she kisses him as fiercely as he kissed her, pressing her body to his and drinking in everything she can.

They're both unsteady when she leans back, and he's looking at her as though she is a knot he has no idea how to untie. "The way I see it," she begins, struggling to contain her breathing and the effect he has on her, to not let him see it, "you can spend the night in my bed, or you can return through the storm to your tent, which may or may not be entirely soaked through. _You_ certainly will be by the time you reach the beach."

And then she raises her brow at him in the same challenge he has issued her a thousand times before turning around and walking toward the back stairs. There's no sense in locking the place up with the amount of men sleeping on the floor and tables, and the liquor is already locked away in the storeroom.

He follows her, just as she thought he would.

But when they reach her bedroom, and the door is closed behind them with nothing more than a half-dozen candles to light the space, he doesn't immediately pull her back to him. Instead, his eyes run over the room, taking it in, and that sly smirk of his spreads across his lips once more.

"What?" she demands, hiding her own insecurity with a snarl.

He shakes his head slightly, but he reaches for her, his arms solid around her waist even as she glares up at him, his amusement not appreciated. "You surprise me, Eleanor. I am not a man easily surprised, but _you_ , you manage it."

"What about this room surprises you?"

"That I'm in it." It's a strangely honest statement, and there's an undercurrent, a hint of the _never good enough_ feeling she has worked so hard to bury in herself, and she wonders for a split second what the hell happened to him to make him so hard – and how it is that she softens him.

But whatever has held him back snaps, and there are no more coherent thoughts left in her head as he yanks his shirt over his head before going to work on her clothes. She is far too brazen to be embarrassed by her own nakedness, far too interested in examining his body to care as he backs toward the bed and settles himself between her thighs.

"I'm told the first time hurts," he says, brutally honest as he watches her. One callused finger dips into the hollow of her collarbones before sliding over the curve of her breast to circle her hardened nipple. He glances down to watch her body react, and she expects him to say something else, but instead he lowers his mouth to her breast.

And she realizes as his mouth works at her, his teeth dragging across her skin, that it is the only warning he's going to give her, the only opportunity to change her mind. She's not so uninformed to be unaware that the first time is usually not the most pleasant experience, but of all the men on the island she might find desirable enough to consider for the task, the last one she would have imagined being worried about that is Charles Vane.

But there is no fucking way she's backing down now.

It does hurt when it happens, and he's not exactly gentle, thrusting forward all at once with a muttered _fuck_ as her nails dig into his biceps. He breathes deeply, holding himself within her, the burning, pinching pain making her hiss, but when their eyes meet and she sees something like concern swimming in his, she grits her teeth and snaps, "Keep going."

His lips part, a whisper that sounds like her name escaping, but whatever is going to happen between them, there is no room for sentiment, so she pushes her hips against his, driving him deeper and forcing his hand. Whatever he was about to say is lost, his groan vibrating through her as he drags himself out and slams back in.

It gets better, the burning subsiding, and pleasure returns. He must see it on her face, the moment when the pain passes and she begins to understand what all the fuss is about. He keeps it slow at first, pressure building at the base of her spine as he moves, but as she begins to move with more confidence, his rhythm falters and one curse after another peppers her skin. His breaths growing short, he reaches between them, using his thumb to drive her right over the edge before collapsing onto her.

They're both soaked in sweat, the room stuffy from being sealed up against the rain. His breaths are harsh on her skin, pants that match her own, and he's heavy, but there's something pleasant about his weight, the scrape of his beard against her throat right before he rolls off her.

They don't speak, the rain drumming on the roof so loudly it drowns out the sound of his breaths beside her. And maybe it's the newness of the experience, or maybe it's the shivers of pleasure running through her still, but she stares up at the ceiling and whispers _thank you_ into the quiet.

"You're welcome," he drawls out, his hand falling to her thigh and squeezing, and she can just _see_ the lascivious smirk she knows he's wearing despite her eyes on the ceiling.

"Not for that, nice as it was," she says with a breathless laugh. He's grown serious by the time she's worked up the nerve to look at him, and he hesitates for a moment, but then he leans down and kisses her. It's slow, and it's nothing like the kisses they've shared in the last hour. When he pulls back, there's a moment where his eyes are soft, his fingers dragging ever so lightly over her bruised jaw.

But it's gone as quick as it came, and he turns away from her, rising from the bed in all his naked glory. He must feel her stare on him as he stretches, lazy as a housecat as he rips open one of the french doors. "It's fucking hot in here."

She should tell him to close the door, that someone might see him, but she realizes she doesn't care. After his display in the tavern, even if she hadn't let him fuck her tonight, everyone on the beach would assume he had by morning. Hasn't this been her plan all along? To draw in the force of mayhem that is Charles Vane and tame him at her side, prove to the crews that she can control the most wild among them? He certainly looks wild at the moment, all lean, hard muscle, his hair snarled by her hands and his arms braced against the door frame.

Charles remains there for a long moment, the wet breeze misting over his skin as she comes up behind him, his body shielding hers from anyone who might be watching as her hands settle on his hips and begin to wander. He hums his approval, leaning back slightly, her breasts pressed to his back as she brushes a kiss between his shoulderblades.

But the moment her lips touch the spot, he tenses, his hands finding hers and stilling them. She wants to ask what the problem is, why he's suddenly so rigid, but he doesn't give her the chance, pushing her up against the wall and claiming another bruising kiss.

It isn't until later, when he's fallen asleep on his stomach and she lies awake, that she realizes what set him off – her lips pressed against an _x_ formed by long, brutal scars across his back, the marks of a lashing so cruel his skin must have taken weeks to mend itself. She has the strangest urge to trace the terrible lines with her lips, but she doesn't wish to wake him, doesn't wish to be caught doing something so sentimental and foolish as caring about who gave him those scars and if that person is dead.

He's gone when she wakes up in the morning, the french doors closed against the sounds of the street and the bright sunshine streaming through the glass, a sure sign the storm has passed.

For now.


	2. Chapter 2

"Charles, what did you do?"

Vane lifts his brows, giving Jack a quick and dismissive look before turning his attention back to removing the blood from his hands. His shirt hangs off the chair behind him, the damp fabric already beginning to dry in the heat of the early morning. It's just after dawn, the day beginning to stretch lazily over the sky from the east. The storm has blown out and it will be a clear day. The seas will still be too rough to hunt, but after a quick few hours of sleep, it will be a good day to prepare for their next trip.

"Charles."

"Fuck you, Jack," he snaps, not in the mood for his friend's company – not in the mood for anyone's company, really. It's been a long night, not entirely unpleasant but long, and he would like nothing more than a few hours' peace.

"Tell me you didn't fuck the Guthrie girl. Tell me you didn't fuck her, and then go kill that imbecile from the tavern." Jack leans against the tent pole, his expression weary and his voice so earnest it grates on Charles' nerves. If it were anyone else in his tent, he'd have bloodied his knife all over again by now. "When I said it would be best for us all if you just fucked her already, I meant for you to simply fuck her, not defend her honor or whatever it is you think you've done."

"Eleanor is not your concern." Charles glances at Jack out of the corner of his eye, lifting his hands from the now murky water basin to inspect them. "Drop it."

"She's dangerous."

Charles actually laughs at that, shaking his head and wiping his hands on his bare skin. "Who are you to lecture me about fucking dangerous women?"

"Anne is not dangerous to me. Or you." Jack frowns, and Charles follows his stare to the small bruise on his chest, evidence of Eleanor. It's all he can do not to smirk at his friend's scowl – Charles left marks of his own. He hadn't wanted the responsibility of taking her virginity, hadn't wanted to deal with an emotional wreck of a girl barely a woman, but she surprised him – she keeps surprising him, and that's what he likes about her.

And she refuses to be afraid of him, even though she really ought to be.

"Anne is a weapon." Charles holds up a hand when his oldest friend begins to protest, unable to stop the small, amused smile from gracing his lips at Jack's instant indignation. "I don't question what she means to you, Jack. It's not an insult."

"You mean to make Eleanor your weapon," Jack surmises after a beat, and though Charles doesn't make a move to confirm it, he's met with a groan of protest all the same. "She isn't on our side. She's on her side. That's the sort of creature she is."

"The insult demanded an answer."

"Certainly not from you."

"You're clever enough to figure this out, Jack. If she loses her authority, we lose a reliable means of selling our goods on Nassau. Right now, it's in our interest to keep her in business. And when she sees that our interests align, she'll be useful."

"But she's not useful now. You know how it looks to the street, yes? You killing on her behalf?"

Charles doesn't dignify the question with a response, leveling a hard stare at the other man. He knows exactly how it looks, knows the assumptions that will be made. He's counting on those assumptions, counting on the street to spread the rumor far and wide. For years, Richard Guthrie's daughter has been untouchable, but not any longer. And Charles doesn't especially care for the politics of the island, but in this instance, the mutterings can only help him to consolidate his power, and so he will allow it.

If Charles Vane can command the respect of the crew, of the street, _and_ fuck the untouchable Miss Guthrie whenever he pleases, well, that stacks the deck nicely.

The fact that he stepped up behind Eleanor last night _without_ any of those considerations in mind, the fact that he did it simply because he couldn't _not,_ is a matter he ignores for the present.

"I hope you know what you're doing, my friend," Jack mumbles, scrubbing his hand over his face and yawning. "Anne and I will go into town later, find out what's being said."

Charles nods his approval, holding Jack's stare with one of his own. This isn't something they're going to talk about at length – despite having listened to Jack wax poetic about Anne too many times to count well into a bottle of rum, Charles has no impulse to talk about Eleanor.

No, he prefers to keep his thoughts to himself, to savor the side of her he long suspected existed but only experienced for the first time last night. And once Jack has left and he's alone, he gives himself over to the memories, the bold touch of her hands despite her inexperience, her utter lack of shame, the smoothness of her skin under his calloused hands.

Her complete unwillingness to be denied, boldly telling him what he already knew – that he wanted her, virgin or not. So sure of herself in voice, despite the tremble he felt in her body, but never showing him an ounce of fear; the unexpected surprise of Eleanor giving herself to him without hesitation.

And then there was the oh-so-soft brush of her lips on his scars, and the fraction of a second where he felt something tighten in his chest before burying it under the more acceptable rush of desire and lust her naked body pressed to his brought on. There is no room in his life for sentiment, and there is definitely no fucking room for an attachment that could be used to undermine him.

Jack isn't entirely wrong – Eleanor _is_ dangerous – but Charles isn't some simple, besotted fool, no matter what he felt in her bed last night. It doesn't matter that she intrigues him, that he's enjoyed their cat and mouse game for years. He suspects he's about to enjoy it even more now that he's been invited to her bed, and the rules of engagement have shifted.

But if she thinks he's going to cling to her skirt, she doesn't know him at all. And so when Teach informs the crew they'll be in Nassau through the end of the week, Charles keeps to the beach.

Let her come to him.

-x-

Word reaches Mr. Scott before long of Vane's move in the tavern, the inevitable whispers of the street resulting in a much-embellished version of events, to the point where Eleanor laughs in his face when he demands to know why she is allowing Vane to kill men on her behalf.

"He did no such thing," she insists, shaking her head and glancing back at the ledger she was in the middle of sorting before Mr. Scott came into her office. "He was standing behind me during the disagreement, and if that idiot was fool enough to think it meant Vane gives a shit about me, that's his fucking problem."

"He's dead," Scott replies flatly, folding his arms across his chest. "He was found in the morning with his throat slit."

Eleanor shrugs, making a note beside the tally of sugarcane. "I don't see how one pirate of a rather unremarkable crew having his throat cut in a camp full of murderers and thieves has anything to do with me. Besides, Vane couldn't have done it. He was otherwise occupied."

She says it so matter-of-factly she realizes only belatedly that she's just told her pseudo-father she took one of the island's most dangerous men into her bed. But she also realizes that she has no idea what time Vane left, and that it is entirely possible he returned to the beach before dawn to execute a man who disrespected her.

"Eleanor, you must stop this foolishness right now."

"No."

"No?"

She sighs, setting her quill down and folding her hands neatly in her lap. She is the picture of politeness, but the image fractures when she opens her mouth. "No. What I do with Vane is my concern, not yours. I'm not afraid of him. And if he did kill that bastard, then it should give you some measure of comfort."

"Comfort? Are you mad?"

She shrugs, a small part of her wondering if Mr. Scott is right. Perhaps it _is_ mad to get close to Vane, to sleep beside him, but the instinct driving her is stronger. The pirate is her path to success on the island, and so she will move forward with her plans. "If he did as you say, then he did it to defend me. To keep me safe. Isn't that what you're always lecturing me about? My safety?"

"It is hardly the same."

"I disagree." Eleanor turns her attention back to the books, listening for Mr. Scott's steps to fade and the door to close once again before she lifts her head and rises from the chair to stand at the window and look out on the beach below.

Somewhere down there, Vane and his crew are camped. _Did_ he kill that man? She hasn't seen him since the night in her bed, and that was days ago. At first she merely assumed Teach had gathered the crew to hunt, but she's seen the others in the tavern and in the street.

By nightfall, Eleanor has lost her patience with the spiral of her thoughts. Who is he to cast her off like a common whore? She's not foolish enough to assume their night together means anything to him, that he harbors any affection for her, but to outright avoid her is ludicrous – especially when word about town is that he's committed murder on her behalf.

Leaving the tavern behind in semi-capable hands, Eleanor stalks down to the beach. She knows these camps, and she knows where to find him in the heart of the mess. But for all the times she's roamed through the camps, there is something different tonight, something in the stares of the men that makes her hold her chin just a fraction higher, her spine just a little straighter.

She tells herself she doesn't care if they know she fucked Vane. It doesn't matter. She isn't beholden to them, and she doesn't owe them anything. Besides, if her plan is to work, if she is to find a way to influence him, it's going to happen again. If there's anything the whores have taught her, it's how easily men will spill their secrets when all their capacity for sense has gone between their legs.

She finds him drinking rum by a fire, Rackham and Bonny at his side as always. Jack looks up when she steps into the light, and she catches the way his eyes dart between her and Vane as he laughs nervously. "Miss Guthrie," he says in greeting, earning him a scowl from Vane and a sharp elbow from Bonny.

"A word," she demands, coming to a stop inches from Vane's boots, ignoring his friends. He takes his time looking up at her, running his eyes over every inch in a meandering perusal before his amused gaze meets hers. "In private," she adds when it's clear he has no intention of moving from his spot in the sand. " _Now_."

He gets to his feet slowly, limbs unfolding until he's staring down at her, the shadows cast by the fire only highlighting the sharpness of his features. He reveals nothing in his expression beyond that same infuriating mirth at her expense she's seen so many times before, the light catching the pale blue of his eyes. "This way," he finally says, striding off into the maze of tents.

She knows which is his, but he doesn't need to know that, and so she follows him, silently fuming and staring daggers into his shoulders.

"What the fuck, Charles?"

He turns slowly, his arms folding across his chest as he regards her in the flickering lantern light. The motion tightens his shirt across his shoulders as annoyance replaces amusement, his eyes narrowing. "You'll need to be more specific."

She wants to scream. She wants to rip the dagger out of his belt and stab him with it. But she also wants to shove him back onto the pile of blankets that make up his bed, so she takes a steadying breath and finds herself a bit of control.

"Did you do it?"

"Do _what_?" he growls, the already infamous temper flaring. "If you've come down here to fling accusations at me, then I suggest that you–"

"Did you kill him?" she cuts in, watching him for any hint of the truth.

"Yes," he answers without hesitation.

"Why?"

He shrugs, pushing an escaped lock of hair back behind her ear in a move that could be tender if they weren't discussing murder. "You know why, Eleanor."

And it should bother her that he's done this, that he's _killed_ for her, but the thing about growing up in Nassau is that murder is a way of life. The family business is a criminal enterprise, and the men who fill their warehouses are not farmers. They are pirates, and a slit throat is a common solution to a problem.

So no matter what she _should_ feel, the reality is that it _doesn't_ bother her. In fact, standing in the middle of the pirate camp with Vane's intense stare on her, his darkness calls to hers. He is completely unapologetic for his actions, and watching him now, she knows in the marrow of her bones that he would do it again.

And she doesn't care.

"You've been avoiding me."

If the change in topic surprises him, he doesn't let on, but he does take a step closer. The tent isn't that large, and another step will put him toe to toe with her. "You knew where to find me."

"This isn't a fucking game."

"Isn't it?" He reaches out, his thumb tracing the shadow on her jaw, the lingering proof that the night in the tavern wasn't a dream. His dark stare meets hers, and she can't suppress the shiver that tears through her at the wicked promise in his eyes. "You're using me for your own ends."

"And you're not?" she spits back, jerking away from his touch.

His answer is to pull her back, both palms on her face, and kiss her – an all-consuming, overpowering kiss. He tastes of smoke and rum and sweat, and it's already familiar, and she already craves it. And she already knows what's going to happen next the moment his mouth touches hers.

There's no pause this time, no hesitation from him whatsoever as his body demands hers. They crash into each other, tumbling down onto the blankets as they paw at fabric and skin. He growls as she yanks the leather cord out of his hair, leaving it free to grab by the fistful when she wants to bring his mouth back to hers, and the sound goes straight to the apex of her thighs.

He rips her shirt open in retaliation, buttons popping free or tearing off under his merciless grip. Eleanor's back arches the moment his lips touch her breast, and she doesn't bother trying to muffle a single sound of her pleasure as he licks and bites and sucks his way across her body. And when he rears back to strip off his shirt and open his trousers, she barely has time to drink in the sight of him before he pushes her skirts up around her hips and buries himself in her waiting heat.

The pinch and burn isn't nearly as bad as it was the first time, and it's already forgotten as he sets a hard pace, his hands and mouth working her into such a frenzy that the whole thing is over in minutes.

"Are you staying?" he asks as he rolls off her, not bothering to do up his pants. The question is breathless, and it sends a thrill down her spine – _she_ did that.

Eleanor should say no to his invitation. She should straighten her clothes and return to the tavern before Mr. Scott realizes she's gone. She should absolutely not agree to stay with Charles Vane in his tent, where he has just fucked her so thoroughly she's certain everyone around them heard.

The thing is, Eleanor isn't really a fan of doing things simply because she _should_. She's always liked being in the camps, and if the last twenty minutes is any indication of what it will be like to spend time in Vane's tent, then she doesn't particularly want to leave.

"If I stay, do you think you can manage to take your boots off before you fuck me again?"

He laughs, a deep, genuine laugh that she suspects is a rare treat indeed. "That can be arranged." The smile he offers is lazy as he turns his head on the pillow to look at her. "You interrupted what was about to be my dinner. Have you eaten?"

She shakes her head, and he rolls onto his side to kiss her once more before rising and buttoning his pants closed. "Stay here." Without bothering to pull his shirt back on, he disappears, and Eleanor lays back in the sheets that smell of him, wondering just what the fuck she's getting herself into.

But after a moment, she realizes she's been left alone in his tent. Her shirt still hanging open, Eleanor sits up to take in his space and see what she can learn about him.

She is surprised by the order of his things, the neat stacks of charts and maps, the folded clothes placed in a basket, waiting to be worn. Curiosity gets the better of her, and she crawls out of the blankets for a closer look. Vane's sword belt hangs off the back of a chair, and she runs her fingers over the leather, imagining him in all his glory as he arrives fresh from a hunt, flush with success and every inch a pirate lord.

It's there that he finds her, and she expects his anger, expects to be told to keep her hands off his things, but he merely sets down the heaped plate of food and bottle of rum before coming to her side. "You really aren't capable of following orders, are you?" His breath hot on her throat, his arms loop around her waist from behind, tugging her back into his embrace, his words laced with laughter. "You'd make a terrible pirate."

"I don't take orders from you." She sighs as his lips move down her neck, pushing aside the open collar of her shirt as he goes, and she leans into him, luxuriates in the feel of his body against hers. One of his arms remains banded low on her hips, but the other hand moves, his calloused palm flat against her ribs, urging her back against him.

But then he stops, releasing her and guiding her back toward the makeshift bed. "Eat, Eleanor," he says with a gesture to the steaming meat and fried plantains, sinking his teeth into his own meal.

It's the last thing she expected when she set out for the beach earlier in the night, to be sitting on his bed sharing a meal. He asks her questions about business, first that of his crew, and then more generic ones – and for the first time in all the years she's been acquainted with him, they just talk. It's not a battle of wills, it's not a contest to see who will break, but a simple, easy conversation that continues even once the food is finished.

If he's as surprised as she is by the ease between them, she doesn't know. He's as adept at schooling his features as she is, and for all that's passed between them, they both harbor many, many secrets. But she is surprised by how much she enjoys his company, that she doesn't regret her decision to stay this night with him.

As nice as the civility between them is, when she spills a small amount of rum, his eyes follow the bead of it down over her jaw, and then he's on her, licking the rum away before pressing her back into the mattress.

He undresses her easily, his fingers nimble on the ties of her skirt, and when he's shoved all the fabric onto the floor beside them, he kneels between her legs, spreading her thighs and dropping a kiss on the inside of her knee. She pushes herself up onto her elbows, their eyes locking, and the intensity of the lust staring back at her is enough to make her breath catch.

And she keeps watching as he begins to kiss the inside of her thigh, his glance flickering back to hers every few seconds. With her pulse pounding in her veins, she watches as he moves higher and higher up her thigh with maddening slowness. She's done this with the girls at the inn before, exploring with the relative safety of another woman, but she's never had a man put his mouth between her legs. She's wondered what it might be like if he were to do it to her, wondered long before he was in her bed, and when his mouth finally clamps down, she lets loose a string of _fuck fuck fuck_ that has him laughing against her, producing an entirely new sensation right along with the scratch of his beard.

But his amusement fades, and Eleanor's hips strain against him as he works her with his tongue and fingers. He does this like he does everything else – intensely. It doesn't take long for him to shove her over the edge, and she's still struggling to refocus her attention on something other than the waves of pleasure washing over her when he kicks off the rest of his clothes and thrusts in.

"Enjoy that, did you?" he asks, all smug satisfaction as he presses deep, pausing with his hips flush to hers.

She did, and he knows she did, but she'll be damned if she's going to say so. Instead, she tugs him down, kisses him to distract him, and shoves her weight against his so he's the one on his back. She does it to shut him up, to be the one in control, but there's something about the pleased anticipation he looks up at her with that makes her wonder if he didn't somehow goad her into it.

Except now that she's here, a thread of doubt manages to worm its way into her, a moment where she realizes she's now the one to set their pace, to set their rhythm, and he's been with women trained in the art of pleasure, lots of them. How is she ever going to hold his attention when she barely knows what she's doing?

And maybe he sees that flicker of doubt, or maybe he just grows impatient with her, or maybe he knows her enough by now to understand that a soft word would do far more damage than his fingers digging into her hips. He guides her along until instinct takes over, until she's so lost in the pleasure of chasing that high again that she doesn't care if it's sloppy, or who else he's been with.

She's the one in his tent tonight. She's the one he's killed for. She's the one turning his breath ragged, the one who can feel his eyes on her, wanting – always, _always_ wanting.

She's the one whose hand he takes as they lay together after, her thumb grazing the cool metal of his rings as their fingers tangle. There's something incredibly gentle in his touch in that moment, his eyes barely open and his body relaxed against hers, and when she shifts closer to throw her leg over his, he hums quietly, a content rumble that reminds her of a tabby cat sunning himself.

Eleanor knows she should go – that falling asleep like this is crossing a line she can't uncross, but she's already half-asleep. It's just one night. And in the morning, when she wakes to his mouth on her skin and his hand between her legs, it's easy to forget the moment the lines blurred – it's easy to lose herself in the intense pleasure that is being the center of Charles Vane's world for the space of time she's in his bed.

And if he lingers when he kisses her before she steps out of his tent, then it's just proof her plans are working – nothing else.


	3. Chapter 3

Eleanor never expected to enjoy her time with Charles Vane the way that she does, and somehow, somewhere along the line, she begins to forget that her purpose in beginning all of this was a power play.

Mr. Scott hates it, hates that when Teach's ship is in the bay, Eleanor is in Vane's bed, or he is in hers. Neither of them give a single fuck who knows it, and Eleanor's presence in the camps shifts, a grudging respect she's never had before now bestowed upon her. And maybe it's because they know Vane will retaliate if they move against her, but it could also be that she has made the entire enterprise more profitable than ever.

But she promises herself she will never be on the beach waiting for him – she will never be a lovesick fool brought low by a man, even if that man is Charles. Instead, she waits for him to come to her, to finish offloading cargo and present himself at the warehouse. Half the time he arrives still covered in blood, and it becomes habit to scan his body, to assess how likely it is that any of the blood belongs to him, and to swallow the inane _are you hurt_ that presses against her lips.

They conduct their business with all due seriousness, neither of them willing to sacrifice their hard-won positions to their lust for each other. But when the day's take is tallied, and the men have begun to drift from the tavern to the whorehouse, he finds her in an alcove or a storeroom, and while sometimes they make it behind a closed door, a great deal of the time they don't. Their desire for each other is insatiable – she's just as often the one to push him up against a wall, her hand between them stroking him through his leathers, as he is the one to dance his fingers under her skirt and have his way with her.

And for a little while, they simply exist with each other. It's hunting season, and he's rarely back in Nassau for more than a handful of nights before taking to the seas for weeks at a time. The months drag on, broken up by his returns, but as the season begins to slow, he informs her of his decision.

"Next time, you come to me," he says, and despite the fact that her head is pillowed on his shoulder and his fingers continue to graze her hip, the words are hard.

"What?" Something has been off since he walked into the tavern, but until this moment, she's chalked it up to events at sea he doesn't wish to discuss – but now, his tone, the _command_ in it, makes her wonder if his problem isn't out at sea at all.

"Next time I return to Nassau, you will be waiting in my tent," he all but growls, his fingers tightening possessively over her. "You come to me."

"What the fuck are you talking about? _Wait_ for you? I have responsibilities, Charles."

"Do you think me so desperate to fuck you that I'll just wait downstairs, everyone watching, until you decide to open your legs?"

"Fuck you," she snaps, beginning to pull away. His hand stills on her hip, every muscle in his body instantly rigid despite how languid he was only a moment before. They snarl and snap at each other, and he leaves, and she fumes.

He doesn't come to the tavern. She doesn't go to the beach. They are locked in a stalemate of their own making, and just as she once refused to be the first to blink, Eleanor refuses to be the first to bend – even as she realizes his request, though it might have been discussed more civilly, isn't entirely unreasonable.

In the end, Jack is the one who approaches her, anxiously glancing around the tavern to see who might be watching. Anne remains at their table, her eyes narrowed in concentration, but whatever it is Jack has to say, he doesn't so much as pause when his eyes sweep over Eleanor. "I don't know what the trouble is," he begins, helping himself to a refill of his mug, "and I don't wish to know."

"Fuck you, Jack," Eleanor growls in return, snatching the rum bottle back from him. "Stay out of it." She nods toward where Anne is sitting, her scowl only darkening when Eleanor's attention falls on her. "See to your own affairs."

"He nearly took my head off this afternoon. Makes it a touch hard to _stay out of it_." Jack sighs, and there's a moment where his mask drops, and he is weary, and he is here, pleading on behalf of his friend who is too proud and too stubborn to ever do so himself. "Neither of you is finished with the other, so stop acting as though you don't give a shit. Go to the fucking beach, Eleanor. I believe it's safe to say it's better for us all when the two of you are in agreement. He is resolved not to come here."

She doesn't bother to reply, leveling him with her coldest stare before marching off to pour drinks for less irritating customers, giving Anne a wide berth. Jack, in his own way, has warmed to her these months, but Anne has always regarded her with poorly veiled suspicion. Perhaps she knows Eleanor has less than honorable intentions toward Charles; perhaps Anne is just a bitch. Hard to tell in a place like this, but Eleanor doesn't really care. Anne is Jack's problem, not hers.

Eleanor doesn't _want_ to care about Vane's moods. She doesn't want to care that she's already begun to privately consider the fact that he might be right – that among the crew, the balance of power is critical to survival. For him to share her bed is one thing, but for him to constantly go to her, well, the men just might take it exactly as he says.

Desperate. Pathetic. Soft.

And she can't have any of those words applied to Vane – that will put a wrinkle in the plan she's slowly been formulating over the last few months, a plan to see Teach off the island and Charles a captain. If it works, she will be the woman who threw a pirate lord off his throne and raised a new one in his place. She will command Nassau.

The fact that she will accomplish all of this while providing Charles the opportunity to snatch his own dream, well, that's just a happy coincidence. She didn't choose him, after all, because of their understanding – she chose him because he is relentless in his pursuit of the things he wants, a trait they share. He will do whatever is necessary to win, and the more he wins, the more money they both make.

But tonight isn't about money. Jack levels a final stare at her before departing with Anne, leaving Eleanor emptying mugs – leaving her to consider just what the fuck it is she's doing.

In the end, it doesn't matter if she goes to him because she's protecting her business interests in seeing him made captain, or because she simply wants him. The outcome is the same, and she tells herself that because of that, there's no sense in sorting out the particulars. It doesn't _matter_ why she sits down beside him before a fire, his crew giving him – and her – a wide berth.

He's silent, continuing to sip off his bottle of rum while watching the flames. He doesn't look at her, and he doesn't offer her any of the liquor, but after they've sat in silence for nearly thirty minutes, he gets to his feet. She can feel the anger still rolling off of him, the banked fury just waiting for a spark to erupt back into an inferno, but she isn't prepared for the glare he levels at her when she follows him into his tent.

"Why the fuck are you here?"

It's as though he's slapped her, and while a better woman might have realized in that moment she'd hurt him, Eleanor's temper rises to meet his. "Isn't this what you wanted, Charles? For me to present myself to you, here, in this place, where all of the crew can hear us fuck?"

It's the first time he smirks at her not with laughter in his eyes, but with malice. It is the look that has silenced crews and emptied rooms, and despite the shiver of fear it brings on, Eleanor doesn't back down. She lifts her chin, and she glares right back at him, and she waits for his response.

"Come here," he finally says, eyes glittering, one hand on the handle of the knife strapped to his side. She ignores the threat, ignores that she is playing a dangerous game with a dangerous man, and crosses to him, her one concession to his anger and the possibility that she might have been the one in the wrong.

He strips her of her clothes methodically, tossing the garments to the ground, but it's only when she's fully naked and he's still standing there, boots and sword in place, that he touches her, hauling her up against him as his lips descend on her neck. The metal hilt of the knife and the sword dig into her ribs, the buckles and straps layered over his shirt harsh against her skin, and when he yanks the pins from her hair, the grip of his fingers against her scalp is tight with barely leashed frustration.

She recognizes it for what it is – him exerting control over the situation, over her, but more than anything, over himself.

Charles has always been an attentive lover, but now he's selfish as he bends her over the small table he keeps in the tent, relentlessly chasing his own pleasure with little regard to hers. He's angry, and he's far from gentle, but it's still Charles, and she still craves him, still wants him, and so she pushes her hips back into his, meets him thrust for brutal thrust. She closes her eyes to the tent, to the rest of the camp surrounding them, and simply gives in to the familiar sensations – his harsh breaths on her back, the grip of his hands on her hips, the drag of him inside her. He's dancing along a thin line as their skin slaps together, his touch stopping shy of hurting her, but he's making no attempt to disguise that in this moment, he _wants_ to hurt her, that it's only his self-control keeping him from unleashing his true fury.

She turns to face him when he's finished, pushing off the table and taking a deep, calming breath, half to settle her body and half to settle her mind for the battle that's not yet over. He's still fully dressed, with the exception of his cock hanging out of his pants, and if things weren't so difficult right then, the sight would be humorous. Things between them balance on the edge of a knife, and Eleanor still isn't afraid of him, not really, but the darkness that lives in him is very close to the surface as his eyes follow her movements.

"You will be here, next time?" he asks, not adjusting his clothes, not reaching for her, but watching her with a distant coolness that shouldn't be possible considering he was just inside her.

"I will come to you once the day's business is concluded," she says after a pause, because they're even for the moment, and it's one battle of a much longer war. Next time, she will go to him – but he will come to her the time after that, whether he knows it yet or not. She will be his equal, not only in his eyes, but also the eyes of the men.

He nods, unbuckling the sword belt and letting it fall to the ground with a thud. The rest of his clothes follow, and when he finally kisses her mouth, his skin bare against hers, the tension she's been carrying begins to fade. It will never be gentle between them, but it's slower when he takes her again in his bed, and the sweep of his fingers, the brush of his lips, that's the only apology he's going to offer for the way he treated her when she first arrived.

She presses a kiss to the brand on his shoulder after, when they're still pleasantly tangled together and sleep is just beginning to beckon. It's not the first time she's done it, but tonight, tracing the lines with her fingertip after her lips leave his skin, this is _her_ version of an apology – her way of saying she understands without ever actually admitting it.

He will never wear shackles again, imagined or iron – he will not be seen as property by anyone, even her.

The hand on her thigh tightens its grip, and he breathes out slowly before he says, "I escaped when I was nine. Killed three men to do it." The words are flat and emotionless, but she recognizes his tone, knows it well – it's the one meant to hide his true feelings, forged steel against a press of terrible memories, a straightened spine in the face of any weakness.

It's a tone she learned long ago.

Eleanor thinks of the scars on his back, thinks of how young he must have been when they pressed the hot iron into his skin and tore him open with a lash, wonders how young he was when he hardened himself to the world. What could a child have possibly done to deserve such a brutal beating?

She doesn't ask, but she does curl closer, his hand moving from her thigh up over the dip of her waist and the curve of her back to her hair, his fingers twisting in the tangled strands. He doesn't say anything else, likely lost in memories she can't begin to fathom, but he doesn't let her go, and she presses her lips to his chest, one of her legs thrown over his, her palm resting over his ribs. And it's not that they haven't laid entwined before after fucking, their bodies cooling in contented silence, but this...this is different. This is something tender and soft – this is him being vulnerable, exposing himself to her, and not shying away from it; this is him telling her his secrets with his heartbeat under her ear, for no reason other than he wants her to know.

This is Charles not bothering to hide himself – not his anger at her over their argument, and not the tenderness he shows her in its aftermath – and this is Eleanor being with him, not because of her investments or political machinations, but because in that moment she simply wants to.

It's one of those terrifying nights where she feels something shift between them, another piece falling into place, and she should stop it, but she doesn't.

Because Eleanor Guthrie still doesn't do anything just because she should.

-x-

"It's a funny thing," Teach says as he walks up to where Charles stands at the rail, one eye on the horizon, the other on the crew. They'll be in Nassau by nightfall, and after three weeks at sea, the men are all anxious to be back on shore for one reason or another.

And if Teach were a mind reader, the funny thing might be that Charles is among them – it's been years since he's looked forward to shore leave with any real vigor. He's always preferred to be at sea, to be on the move with the deck beneath his feet and a sword on his hip. If it weren't for sex and replenishing their stores, he's not sure he'd ever leave the water.

Except now, he sees Eleanor when he closes his eyes, all that shimmering blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders while she rides him – that tiny, small smirk that's always delivered along with a roll of her eyes, a look he's come to realize is a sign of her affection. Or how when the hour grows late, she'll glance at him across the crowded tavern when she thinks no one's watching her, a sly slide of her tongue across her bottom lip and desire darkening her eyes.

He's never had a woman in his life, not like this. Maybe it's changed him. Maybe it hasn't. But he does begin to understand a bit more of Jack's stubborn insistence on standing by Anne, how they haven't killed each other by now despite the close quarters.

Because as angry as Eleanor makes him on occasion, he can't really fathom walking away from her. Even the argument they had several months ago, the problem never really was Eleanor – it was him. He knows her well enough that he should have anticipated how any attempt to command her would be met with an instant and resounding _fuck you_. Had he simply played her the way she plays him so easily, he might have had his way without rousing her temper.

Not that he can really regret that, either. Eleanor with her claws out is a fine thing to behold, and since that night, she's bolder than ever with him. He gets a side of her no one else sees, a piece of her that is _his_.

Charles doesn't stop to consider that he's given her a piece of himself along the way.

Beside him, Teach braces his arms against the rail, following his quartermaster's gaze. "Aren't you going to ask your captain what's so funny?"

The only reply Charles offers is the flick of his eyes toward Teach and a low grumble in his throat. He refuses to participate in what is sure to be some sort of lecture or joke at his expense.

Teach barks out a laugh, one meaty hand falling hard on Charles' back. But he falls silent a moment later, the weight of his hand heavy over old scars. "You spend a great deal of time with the Guthrie woman."

It isn't a question, so Charles doesn't bother with an answer. The captain can surely feel every muscle in his back go rigid, so he doesn't bother to force himself to relax again as he waits for the other man to get to his point. It's sure to irritate him – most people who wish to discuss his relationship with Eleanor irritate him – but unlike Jack, Charles can't tell the captain to go fuck himself. Teach will tolerate a lot from him, but when the captain wants to be heard, he'll be heard.

"There's much to be said for a good woman waiting on shore," Teach continues eventually, and his hand finds its way back to the worn wood Charles leans against. "Nothing wrong with a wife. But that wife needs to know her place, as do you. She is the beach. She is not the ship, or the hunt, or the ocean. You don't bring a teacup on a pirate ship."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Charles snaps, all the talk of wives and teacups giving him the urge to jump overboard and swim the rest of the way back to Nassau. "Don't have a fucking wife. Don't fucking want one."

And Eleanor Guthrie isn't a fucking teacup, but Charles doesn't say that – doesn't reveal that he knows just what the captain is getting at.

No, that woman is made of far sterner stuff than porcelain. She is iron and steel, forged and bent but never broken; she is as fierce as she is clever. He's watched her grow into herself over the years, watched her shake off the disappointment of her father's abandonment and grab hold of his failing empire with both hands, make it something better, stronger. He's seen her go toe to toe with other quartermasters, and perhaps his presence has something to do with how quickly they back down in some cases, but she holds her own.

Eleanor in her element is a fucking sight to behold.

"No, I suppose not. All the same, she has no place on this ship."

"She isn't on the fucking ship."

Teach doesn't say anything right away, and Charles can feel the older man's gaze – the hard, evaluating look of his captain – but he doesn't flinch even as the silence drags between them, the rush of the waves and the call of the gulls as they draw nearer and nearer to shore the only noises over the steady hum of the crew.

The captain follows Charles' stare out to the horizon where Nassau waits just over the edge of the world. "Isn't she?" he finally asks. Teach doesn't wait for an answer, which is just as well. Charles doesn't have one.

-x-

She will never admit it, but Eleanor finds herself doing the most ridiculous, stupid, emotional thing when Charles is gone for long stretches of time.

She sneaks down to the beach, her hair hooded and her face in shadow to remain undetected, and she slips through the camps and into his tent. And despite her bed being more comfortable, and despite how her heart thrums at the possibility of trying to explain herself if she's caught, Eleanor will still strip down and crawl under the blankets, wrapping herself up in them and the scent of Charles until she falls asleep.

And when the first light of dawn wakes her, she redresses, pulls her hood low, and takes a roundabout route back to the tavern to avoid detection, all the while firmly ignoring how fucking sentimental she's being. The excuse she gives herself is that she wants to remind him who it is he's fucking, that she should be present one way or another when he arrives back in Nassau, but it doesn't change the fact that sleeping in his bed settles her – that when she has an especially miserable day clawing her way to the top, wrapping herself up in him gives her the strength to pull herself together and soldier on.

Besides, it's the one fucking place on the island she can truly be alone without fear of being disturbed or her safety. No one will think to look for her in Charles' tent when he's out to sea, and no one is stupid enough to be in Edward Teach's camp without the captain's leave. So it makes perfect sense to sleep here on nights when she wishes to be left to her own devices, when Mr. Scott's incessant lecturing grows to be too much and the very walls of the tavern and all her responsibilities press in on her. It's _quiet_ on the beach when the crews are out hunting, the warm Caribbean breeze stirring the tent fabric and the wash of the waves on the sand lulling her to sleep.

What she doesn't count on is anyone coming into the tent in the dead of night.

The pop and crackle of a fire wakes her, unexpected voices floating through the night. Eleanor tenses, feeling beneath the pillow for the knife she knows Charles keeps there, her fingers curling around the cool hilt as she listens. Teach isn't due back for another two days, but there are definitely men in the camp. Who the fuck has the stones to be in _this_ camp, of all camps, without being a member of the crew?

There isn't time to dress, light spilling into the tent as the flap moves. Adrenaline drives her forward, and Eleanor forgets she's naked, forgets she doesn't have a prayer of success against the majority of the men on the beach, but she has surprise on her side, and that will have to be enough.

It's only as the figure gives a familiar grunt when her body hits hard muscle and worn leather that she realizes it's Charles.

"What the fuck, Eleanor?" he demands, eyes glittering in the dark as he removes the knife from her fingers, tossing it aside. Her nakedness catches up to him then, his gaze dropping to roam over her skin, and his lips curve into a tired smile. "Now, this is a much better greeting than a knife at my throat."

"I didn't know it was you."

"Who the fuck else would come in here?"

"You're early."

"Which you obviously fucking knew since you're here."

Eleanor shrugs, and for not the first time in his presence, her ability to lie easily fails her. And he sees through it, sees _her_ , and something softens him, the last lingering hard edges of the deck falling away as he reaches for her. The kiss he gives her is a surprise, an almost tender gesture that leaves her chest aching when he pulls back to yank his shirt over his head before drawing her back in.

She can taste the salt on his skin, sweat and dirt and the sea, but Eleanor doesn't care, doesn't give him time to wash off the ship as she rids him of his remaining clothes and pulls him down to the mattress.

In the year or so since Eleanor invited him to her bed, it's never been quite like this. Usually when he returns from a hunt, he's almost desperate for her, and there's little finesse in that first coupling – it's an explosion of desires from both sides, weeks of pent up lust unleashed on each other in a torrent of tongues and teeth, skin slapping skin as she gasps and curses along with him. But tonight, it's something else entirely.

He still kisses her as though he's thought of nothing else since he saw her last, but his touch is gentler, almost lazy as he traces the curves of her body, first with callused fingertips and then with his tongue. He already knows every inch of her, but he remaps it, and as Eleanor's eyes close to luxuriate in the feel of him, she wonders not for the first time just what the fuck they're doing with each other, what lines they're crossing that can't be uncrossed.

But it's not the night to ask, not when he finally slides into her and sets a slow, deep rhythm that has her digging her fingers into his hips, pleading for more in a breathless whisper she knows he loves. And sure enough, his hips jerk just a little bit harder, and when she opens her eyes, his features glow with smug satisfaction as he meets her stare.

He kisses her fingers when it's over, his eyes closed and his breath finally slowing. "This was a surprise I could get used to," he tells her, humming with contentment as she untangles her fingers from his to run her thumb over his lips, her fingertips trailing over his beard.

She laughs, leaning down to capture another languid kiss, but doesn't say anything because the honest answer is that she could get used to this too – whatever _this_ is.

When she finally lays back, he squeezes her fingers once more before getting out of bed. It's still dark in the tent without a lit lantern, the moonlight and fires from the camp providing barely enough light to see by as he scoops up the knife and carefully replaces it before going to the shallow water basin and lifting the full pitcher. Their eyes catch as he raises a brow at her with a teasing smirk at the evidence of her presence long before he arrived, but he doesn't say anything, turning his attention to washing off the worst of the grit.

"Has anyone ever taught you to use a knife?" he asks, a deceptive casualness to the question.

"What do you mean?" she replies absently, far more interested in watching him in all his naked glory, water droplets running down his skin, than discussing knives.

"I mean that if it had been anyone other than me coming in here tonight, you'd be fucking dead." There's a pause in the quiet splash of water, his inhalation audible, and she can hear the rage creeping into his voice. "Tell me your useless shit of a father made an attempt to teach you how to defend yourself before he fucking left you here."

It's a night for firsts, because it's also the first time Charles has directly voiced his opinion on Eleanor's father, and she understands with crystal clarity the source of his anger – understands that Charles has done more to protect her in the last year than her father ever has or likely ever will.

"He left guards," she finally answers, the truth of the accusation hitting just a little too closely. What Eleanor knows of knives and guns is largely self taught or a best guess from what she's seen. There's a shotgun in her office in the tavern, but she's been lucky enough that thus far the threat of it in her hands has put an end to trouble. She has no doubt that if it came down to it, she'd be able to pull the trigger, but it would be a lucky shot if she hit anything.

When she glances back at Vane, his back has gone rigid, his scars shimmering in the pale light. Every exposed muscle is taut, and if it weren't for the dangerous current in the air, Eleanor would happily go to him, get on her knees, and show him just how much she enjoys his body. But whatever is different between them tonight, whatever has caused him to loosen his careful control over his emotions, it hums and sparks in the dark, a lit fuse leading to a keg of gunpowder.

"Get dressed," he finally says, tossing the cloth he's been using into the water and reaching for his trousers.

"What, now?" Eleanor huffs, but doesn't move from her spot. "Whatever it is can wait until morning. Come back to bed."

"Put your fucking clothes on and come with me," he snaps, yanking his pants into place and doing up the buttons with sharp, jerky movements. Snatching her shirt up off the floor, he tosses it at her before grabbing the knife off his sword belt and stalking out of the tent.

Eleanor stares at the now empty entrance to the tent, muttering _what the fuck_ under her breath. She debates ignoring him, rolling over and going to sleep, but she thinks about the look in his eyes and the barely-constrained rage in his voice, and whatever has him so riled, ignoring his wishes – no matter how much she hates him ordering her about – won't help matters.

So she puts on her skirt and the shirt, not bothering with shoes or a cloak or stays, and follows him.

Charles leads her down the beach, away from the fires and the men, most of whom have fallen asleep or made their way into town in search of an available whore. Eleanor doesn't bother asking where they're going, the rigid set of his shoulders and the knife clutched in his fingers telling her all she needs to know.

He stops when the camps are but a distant shimmer of light, the roar of the ocean and the whisper of the wind across the dunes and through the palms the only noise save their breaths. "I won't always be here to protect you," he begins, his voice even raspier than usual as he offers her the hilt of the blade, "but I can show you how to protect yourself."

Her protest that she doesn't need him to protect her dies on her lips as he holds out the blade, because whether it's true or not, the reality is that he's offering her something on this dark stretch of beach that no other man in her life ever has – a chance to learn, a chance to do for herself what men have always done for her.

So Eleanor takes the knife.

And for the next hour, Charles explains all the ways in which to kill a man. "Rely on your quickness," he says in her ear, his arms tight around her, his grip on her wrists like manacles. "By the time you're here, it's too late. All of the men are stronger than you. Anne is lethal because they never see her coming." He dodges her kick to his shin easily, moving his leg to secure his grip until he's immobilized her completely. His breath warm on her neck and shoulder, Eleanor forgets the lesson for a moment, stops fighting, and leans back into his grasp, the heat of him bleeding through her shirt, his sweat and hers making the fabric cling to her skin.

Tilting her head back, she rests on his shoulder, the moonlight catching his eyes as he gives her a curious glance, his grip loosening as he senses the shift in her mood. "Thank you," she says softly, not looking away, not bothering to hide the creep of emotion in her voice. It's the middle of the night, they're completely alone, and despite the threat underlying the lesson, she's never felt safer. And part of that has to do with the man at her back, the knowledge that he wouldn't hesitate to end anyone who tries to harm her in his presence, but it's also the knowledge of how much he cares for her.

Not just as the woman he's fucking. Not just as a fence or the tavern owner. But as Eleanor Guthrie. He has nothing to prove to anyone by arming her with this knowledge, nothing to gain from this lesson but a measure of comfort in her ability to keep herself whole when he's not there.

Charles acknowledges her thanks with a nod, and then he kisses her, a deep, needy kiss that leaves her head spinning as he releases her. "We're not through," he rasps, desire lacing every word as he takes her free hand and guides it to the middle of his chest, his sternum hard beneath her fingertips. "Never stab here. Too much bone." He slides her hand lower, muscle flexing under her fingertips. "Here. Angle the knife up, go under."

Eleanor nods, struggling to direct her attention to his lesson, not the temptation of his bare skin. Charles has always been an attractive man, but clad in only his pants, barefoot, and hair loosened by her hand on a beach, his concentration absolute and the sea at his back, he is every inch the pirate the street whispers of – the pirate lord she intends to see him become.

Her muscles burn by the time he's satisfied enough to declare the lesson at an end, the eastern sky beginning to pale with the first hint of the dawn still an hour off. They're both covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and the ocean breeze makes her shiver as they turn back for the camps. "Keep that," he says gruffly, nodding to the knife she still holds, its weight more familiar in her hand now that she has some confidence in how to use it. "And keep it on you at all times."

"Even with you?"

"Especially with me." He grins at her, slinging his arm around her shoulders and pressing a kiss to her temple, but she hears the dark truth he is trying to hide despite the intimate gesture – that he is a dangerous man with a growing list of enemies, and she is important to him.

And that makes her a target.

But the way Eleanor sees it, she's already a target. Vane makes her stronger, and together, they will find a way to bring this place to heel. So she follows him back to his tent, carefully placing the knife next to her shoes, and then gets down on her knees like she wanted to hours ago to show him just how much she appreciates his efforts.


	4. Chapter 4

Jack notices the missing dagger. When he asks, Charles merely shrugs, a decision he regrets the moment his friend's curiosity turns to suspicion.

"Come now, Charles, I know you to be fastidious when it comes to your blades. It did not simply walk off."

"Leave it be," Vane mutters, not bothering to look up from the fire. He was perfectly content sitting in the sand by himself with his rum until Jack decided to join him and ramble on about the fucking knife.

"No, I don't believe that's an option. You see, we both know it did not, as I said, walk off. Were it stolen, you would see it returned, and that's if there was even anyone foolish enough to steal from you in this camp, which there is not. That you are unconcerned about its whereabouts indicates that you do indeed _know_ where it's gone, which means you made a gift of it. Ergo, it is now in the possession of one Eleanor Guthrie."

"Fuck you, Jack."

The noise his friend makes is something between a laugh and a snort. "You cannot be serious."

Charles grunts a reply, turning his attention back to the bottle of rum held loosely between his fingers. It's late and the camp is quiet, most of the men either asleep or up at the inn or tavern. What he's still doing on the beach, Charles isn't entirely sure; usually by now he'd have also made his way into the tavern, coaxed Eleanor into an alcove or back room, and detained her for a pleasant ten minutes or so before setting himself up with a table in the tavern to listen in on the day's news until she was free for the night.

But something about the night he found Eleanor in his tent leaves Charles unsettled, and Jack's meddling questions don't help.

It's not that he gave her the knife – she needs to be able to defend herself. And it's not even really that he taught her to use it – someone fucking needed to. But on that dark stretch of beach, every protective urge he's worked to bury came roaring to life, and he let it; he let himself be in the moment with her, care for her, not just as the source of their income but as something more. He let his anger at her shit of a father ignite in his belly and drive him forward, until there was a blade in her hand and she was armed with some semblance of how to use it.

It's the fact that he couldn't let it go, that rather than join her in his bed, he couldn't let another fucking moment pass without knowing she had some means to keep herself safe. It's the rush of relief and affection that overcame him when he found her waiting in his tent, an instant balm on his sour mood after a seemingly endless day on deck.

It's knowing that despite the times he's told himself that this thing with Eleanor is temporary, his feelings for her are not. Teach is right – a piece of her does board the ship with him, a sliver of Eleanor that is imbedded so far in his ribs he'll never claw her out.

Jack is still rambling on at his side, but Charles ignores him as he rises and stalks out of camp. Jack is smart enough not to follow him down the beach, whether it's his silence, or the set of his shoulders, or an innate knowledge that comes with having spent so much time in one another's company.

Charles walks until the rush of the waves is louder than the pop of the fires, until the scent of the ocean overpowers that of so many men living in one small place, and then he finds himself a spot in the sand, still warm from the day's sunlight. He's not foolish enough to be unarmed, and it's impossible to relax completely, but his shoulders loosen and his breaths deepen as he watches the ocean.

The truth is, he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with Eleanor anymore. Some nights, he thinks it might be the same for her – this thing between them that started as a power play, but has somehow morphed into something else entirely. She has power over him, and that should be an instant reason to sever all ties, but even if it weren't for the business entanglements, he couldn't do it.

He's in love with her.

It's taken him a long time to admit it to himself, but it's not something he can ignore any longer. Denial is more dangerous than acknowledging it, planning for it, hardening himself to it so that any weakness is counterbalanced. He won't be surprised by it, won't allow anyone to throw it in his face as an insult without being prepared.

Charles loves Eleanor – but it's not a romantic epic for the ages. It is something that claws at his throat and twists in his belly; it is a fear for her safety when he is long at sea that is utterly unreasonable but he is powerless to stop.

He hears her footsteps long before she takes a seat next to him in the sand, silent at first, but then she curls into his side, sighing as his arm comes around her shoulders and tucks her close. "Jack told me you'd gone off by yourself," she says quietly, her fingers toying with one of the pendants hanging over his shirt.

"Jack should learn to keep his mouth shut." Charles doesn't take his eyes off the water, his thumb absently rubbing Eleanor's shoulder and his voice quiet. The truth is, he's glad she's found him, glad that as he's still working to process what the fuck he's going to do about being in love with the woman, they're far from prying eyes.

"I stopped to speak with Teach on my way to find you. He plans to set sail by noon tomorrow." His mood must be contagious; Eleanor's words are soft, as though speaking too loudly may upset the peace of the evening.

"You gave him a lead?"

"I did. Sugar cane. Quite a bit of it." Eleanor goes quiet again, but then she exhales all at once, blowing out her breath and tickling his skin. "We'd make quite a team, if you were captain."

He can't help a small laugh, his fingers dropping from her shoulder to drag his knuckles over the swell of her breasts. "We do well together," he agrees, but his voice is filled with suggestion, and Charles really doesn't want to talk business anymore if he's to be back at sea by midday. It doesn't take much to coax Eleanor into his lap, her knees in the sand on either side of his hips, the heat of her thighs bleeding through his pants, and then he kisses her.

And maybe she understands what he's trying to say with that kiss – maybe she can read the press of his thumb along her jaw and the tightening of his arm around her waist as easily as her ledgers. Or maybe she can't. In the end, it doesn't really matter – Eleanor isn't the sort of woman who puts much stock in pretty words. Too many men have offered them to her in her lifetime for her to believe them, anyway.

So Charles doesn't say a fucking word.

-x-

"No."

Eleanor glares at him across her desk, the chair hard against her spine as she watches him lean back, his casual posture a direct contradiction to the fury lashing from his eyes. "Why not?" she snaps, irritated. She's spent months thinking of this, and her plan is logical and sound. There is absolutely no reason for him to refuse.

"You're asking me to betray fucking Teach." He doesn't elaborate, pulling a familiar piece of eight from his pocket and idly flipping it over his knuckles. He forgets how well she knows him by now, forgets that what appears as bored insolence to anyone else reveals to her how unsettled his emotions are – because she knows it isn't just any piece of eight he keeps in his pocket.

And she's seen them together – seen the relationship of a father and son. She knows that Charles is the heir apparent, that Teach intends to leave him the legacy they've built together, but Eleanor is not a patient woman.

Nor does she intend to suffer Teach's influence over Charles any longer. He's smart enough not to directly challenge her, to know that this thing between her and Charles has teeth and that if pressed, the quartermaster would choose her. Instead, Teach undermines her authority every chance he gets, and lord knows what words of wisdom the man imparts on Charles when they're out to sea, miles and miles from Eleanor's influence.

But it can't go on like this forever, and if Teach won't push Charles into choosing a side, then she will.

"Do you want to be a fucking quartermaster forever?"

His eyes flash as he turns his glare on her, the coin disappearing into his palm. "There isn't a drop of loyalty in you, is there?" He laughs, a bitter, harsh noise as his eyes narrow. "How could there be when you've grown up in this fucking place, surrounded by people who are loyal only to themselves."

"Like you know a fucking thing about loyalty," she sneers, and she knows it's the wrong thing to say even before his jaw tightens, his lips pressed into a hard, thin line.

"I know a lot fucking more than you do," he replies after a hard silence. "A captain that rules by fear alone won't be a captain for long. Loyalty – to the ship, to the crew, to each other...you ought to have learned by now that my word fucking means something to me. My _loyalties_ mean something to me." There's a bitter twist on the last of his words, a disgust with her and himself in the twist of his lips. "You wouldn't even recognize it if you fucking had it, would you?"

She remains silent, her temper curling around her tongue like a snake. Despite the tone he's taken with her, as though she were a child in need of scolding, Eleanor isn't that fucking stupid. It might be buried under his seething anger and disgust, but she hears what he won't say – that he's offered her _his_ loyalty, and despite that, despite everything between them, sitting across from her now, he knows she would turn on him if it suited her purposes.

But as it stands, it is in her interests to keep him at her side, and perhaps the conversation is a good reminder of why she got involved with Charles Vane in the first place.

Perhaps she _needs_ this reminder now more than ever. Now, when his kisses and touch are still as lust-soaked as ever, but something tender and soft lives in his eyes when he looks at her – now, when she's had too much to drink and finds herself watching the play of candlelight over the contours of his cheeks, the flames burning in his blue eyes, and wonders if she hasn't fallen in love with him.

"My loyalties are not the topic of conversation," she finally says when it becomes clear he will continue to seethe in silence until she responds. "This isn't about loyalty. It's about making a fucking future for yourself."

Charles has never been a man prone to restless fidgeting, but the stillness that overtakes him as he stares back at her in blatant outrage sends a shiver down her spine. And he stays there for a long moment, not moving, but evaluating her, stripping every mask she's ever worn. "A future?" he finally asks with no little contempt, his voice low but the words razor sharp as he watches her, a hint of an offer she's refused to acknowledge for weeks lingering on his tongue despite the anger swirling around him.

"That's what I fucking said," she snaps, refusing to yield to the whisper of another future, one that doesn't exist for women like her or men like Charles.

"Fuck you, Eleanor." He gets to his feet abruptly, knocking the chair over as he stands and not bothering to set it back to rights before storming out of the office, the door slamming open in front of him.

And she lets him go, because Eleanor and Charles are too damn similar, and she knows that despite his initial knee jerk reaction, he will come to her side of things. He will put his ambitions first, because no matter his loyalty to Teach, no matter what the man has done for him over the years, until Charles is captain of his own ship, he is bound to follow the orders of another – and the thing that he wants most in the world is to be free of anyone save himself. If that means he needs to make a deal with the devil – with _her_ – then he'll do it.

And she supposes it's as it should be – Eleanor has never been a clear summer day. She is a storm in the dead of night, a shipkiller men will remember with fear in their hearts, and Charles Vane has been sailing straight into her for so long it's far too late to change course now.

Still, when she watches Teach get into the skiff from her spot on the beach a month later, Charles is not at her side. He remains with his men, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun as he watches his mentor row out into the bay, his face a hard mask. And when the skiff is too far into the water to be seen, he doesn't so much as look at her before turning back to the men and disappearing into the camp.

He doesn't come to the tavern. However he celebrates his new captaincy, it isn't with her. She tells herself it doesn't matter if he's fucking one of the whores tonight, if he's chosen to revel with his men instead of sharing the victory with its orchestrator – she has no claim on him. They've made each other no promises, and he's known the truth of it from the start.

 _I know you're using me for your own ends_.

It was true that first night together, and it's true now. It doesn't matter how much the lines have blurred between them, how she's not even sure she can call what they're doing in bed _fucking_ anymore, how hollow the victory is without him or how bitter the taste of ash is on her tongue.

She won. She stood on the beach, proud and strong, and all of Nassau knows it was her power at work. She banishes captains and she makes new ones as she pleases. The island is hers, and hers alone.

And so is her bed.

-x-

Not everyone is pleased about the changing of the guard.

Eleanor has long since grown used to the mixture of antagonism and grudging respect afforded to her by the pirate crews, but in the wake of Vane's captaincy, the shift is unmistakable.

She is not one of them. It does not matter how much coin she makes for them, or who she fucks. She is not a man, and therefore, they resent her kingmaking.

But what a king Charles Vane makes.

Matters between them remain tense in the immediate aftermath of Teach's banishment. Vane stays on the beach with his men, and when she visits his tent, their only interaction is a terse exchange of information on the whereabouts of a prize. Charles is all indolence, drunk on rum and sprawled in a chair he refuses to rise from to address her, cigar smoke curling around him.

"Thank you, Miss Guthrie," he drawls when she finishes speaking, his voice a low rumble in her chest. Icy blue eyes meet hers, a familiar challenge staring back at her. His civility is mockery at its finest, but there is none of his usual amusement present. He is not teasing her in that way she has come to realize is a sign of his affection – he is simply baiting her in front of Jack and Anne.

"Try not to get yourself killed," she snaps as she straightens her spine and glares right back. "Would be a fucking waste of my investment." She doesn't bother waiting for a reply, her last words tossed over her shoulder as she sweeps out of the tent.

She buries the niggling worry, the concern for a man she has come to care about despite herself.

And when a storm rolls in three days later, rain lashing the beach and wind turning the harbor into a frothing nightmare, Eleanor tells herself she is worried for her purse.

She doesn't give a shit about Charles Vane.

She doesn't give a shit about her empty bed. She _chooses_ to focus on other things.

She doesn't miss him.

She doesn't.

-x-

It's three weeks before the _Ranger_ limps into port, and Eleanor goes down to the beach to meet the crew – not to check on Vane, because _she does not care_ – but to check on their cargo, if there is any.

But it's impossible to miss the clenched teeth and subtle limp with which Charles comes up the beach. To almost anyone else, it wouldn't be noticeable, but Eleanor has spent a very long time in close proximity to the man's body, and the way he's moving, he's in pain.

"A word, Captain." It isn't really a request, her spine straight and her eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. He levels her with an assessing look, but he nods, sweeping his hand out across the sands with his usual irreverence.

"After you."

She doesn't acknowledge the way her heart begins to slam against her ribs as she gives him her back, the spot between her shoulder blades tingling with the intensity of his stare. It's the first time in a long time he's looked at her even remotely like he used to, the hint of a smirk pulling his lips into a curve she's traced with her tongue more times than she can count.

There's a brief conversation behind her, the low rumble of voices, but she picks out Charles' distinct _fuck you, Jack_ and that's where the conversation ends.

By the time he follows her into his tent, all sense of restraint and reason has fled her mind. She turns, her intention to give him a thorough tongue lashing, to demand to know whether he's brought back a prize or failed her, but all she can see is the faint hint of amusement clouded by pain in his eyes, and when she launches herself at him, it isn't to lash out.

He grunts as her weight hits him, hissing through his teeth as she bumps whatever injury he's trying to hide, but then her mouth is on his, and it's like it was before. His arms surround her, crushing her body to his, the kiss nothing but raw need as the pins holding her hair in place are thrown to the ground one after the other. They clash and fight for what they want, her hands fumbling with his sword belt in an effort to drop it to the ground, his struggling for purchase in the volume of her skirts.

She manages to accomplish her task at the same moment his hand finds its way between her legs, and the noise that he draws from her is half gasp and half groan. It's been weeks since he touched her, weeks since _anyone_ has touched her, and he isn't exactly being gentle, but Eleanor doesn't care. She just wants to forget for a few minutes, forget how complicated things have grown between them, forget his resentment and her bitterness.

But she never wants to forget how it feels when he's inside her, when he's so desperate for her they don't even make it to his bed. He bends her over his makeshift desk, his fingers tightly twined with hers as they grip the edge of the table together while he fucks her, his skin slapping into hers, neither of them able to form words.

It's over in a matter of minutes, leaving them both trembling. He doesn't pull away immediately, his grip on her hands loosening, his thumb caressing the inside of her wrist with such tenderness she nearly yanks her hand away. He kisses the curve of her neck one last time before she can make up her mind, but when she finally stands, her skirts falling back into place, he's watching her as though she's a snake loose in his tent.

"You wished a word?" His voice remains rough with the lingering effect of their coupling as he stands there tucking himself back into his pants and beginning to do up the buttons. Eleanor sees through his forced casualness so easily she wonders why he even bothers.

"What the fuck happened out there?"

He shrugs, and though he manages not to wince, pain flashes in his eyes. "Nasty piece of weather."

"You're hurt."

"It's nothing."

"It isn't nothing. Let me have a look."

"It isn't your fucking concern, Eleanor." He laughs at her undoubtedly shocked expression, the ice in his voice something she's never really expected. "You haven't been in my bed in weeks. One quick fuck doesn't give you dominion over me."

It's a lie, and they both know it. The fact that _one quick fuck_ even happened, circumstances what they are at present, is a testament to her dominion, but Eleanor doesn't say that. Instead, switching tactics, she smiles, undoing the top button of her shirt. "Is that all you want, Charles? One quick fuck?" His eyes follow as she pops open another button, then another.

"Whatever fucking game you're playing, I'm not interested."

But he _is_ interested, because she doesn't miss the way his eyes follow her movements, the way his pulse jumps in his throat, and the subtle shift of his weight as she continues to undress. "You're the one who's chosen to avoid me these weeks," she reminds him, taking a step closer.

"Maybe seeing what a manipulative bitch you can be taught me something."

Leaning closer, Eleanor undoes the final button of her shirt, her lips inches from his ear as she whispers, "Liar. You like it. You always have."

"Fuck you, Eleanor," he spits out, but then his hands are on her, shoving the shirt off her shoulders. His weight is heavy, familiar as he pushes her down onto the bed, his kiss as brutal as the grip of his fingers. There is nothing gentle about how he kneads her breast, pinching the tender skin and scraping his teeth along her neck.

She doesn't care. There's always been something visceral in their need for each other, their desire sharp as any blade – and just as dangerous.

Charles starts to push her skirts up, but she wants his skin on hers, wants him without the yards of fabric in the way. He growls when her nails dig into his biceps, shoving him back until she manages to roll to her side. He sees what she's about the moment she starts to fumble with the ties for her skirt, taking over and yanking the laces free. There's a moment where they're distracted, hurriedly discarding what remains of their clothes, but as soon as she's kicked the skirt free, Eleanor takes what she wants. Throwing one leg over his hips, she sinks down too quickly for him to reclaim control, rolling her hips forward as her nails rake over his chest.

He swears viciously, his eyes squeezing shut as she takes him deeper, her hips tight against his. When his eyes snap open a moment later, she catches a glimpse of longing lingering in his black stare, but whatever it is he's feeling, he doesn't want her to see it. Charles sits up without warning and captures her mouth with his, his fingers tangling in her hair to hold her in place. His other hand drops to her hip, his fingers digging into her soft skin hard enough to bruise, guiding her, keeping her where he wants, asserting his control despite her position above him.

And she lets him, because at the end of the day, Charles is hers, and they both know it.

It's why she lets him flip her onto her back, and despite the hard kisses and nip of his teeth, his strokes become slower, teasing. It doesn't take Eleanor long to realize he wants her to beg, wants her give herself to him like she once did without reservation. But Eleanor isn't the girl she once was, and the balance of power between them isn't what it once was, so she digs her nails into his back, and gives him little more than a few bitten off curses she can't contain.

Neither of them acknowledges it, the battle raging between them, but she sees it when she looks into his eyes, the storm sailing over the horizon straight for her; she feels it in nearly every move he makes, sees it in the hard edge to his smirk when he can tell she's getting close to the edge, and rather than push her over, he takes a step back. It's the force of his thrusts, his hips sure to bruise the inside of her thighs, and it's the tension radiating from him, anger coiling between them right next to their pleasures.

Eleanor gives as good as she gets, dragging her nails down his back, uncertain if it's sweat or blood under her fingertips. It doesn't matter. She craves him, always has, and whether the darkness in him is close to the surface or buried beneath his calm veneer, it's always there. It twines with her own, two shadows merging into one writhing tangle of flesh, neither willing to back down.

They are both stubborn people. It goes on for a long time.

But in the end, she has always been his weakness, and he has always known it, so when he can take it no longer, he drives into her hard and fast. He leans down to kiss her, a sloppy, messy kiss that's more teeth and tongue than lips, and the angle gives her what she needs to fall with him.

They lay together panting after, his fingers twined with hers the only sign that he wants her there, that he isn't about to throw her out into the middle of the camp where everyone knows he's just fucked her.

Twice.

The sun is low in the sky, and it's hot in the tent, their bodies covered in a fine sheen of sweat. She tells herself she doesn't care, that she isn't profoundly relieved to have him next to her, to smell him on her skin even if he has just come off weeks at sea. And when she rolls onto her side to really take a look at him now that he's naked, she tells herself that she definitely isn't concerned about the slash along his ribs.

"What happened?" she asks quietly, running her nail along the edge of the wound. Someone stitched it as sea – by the neat, even rows her guess is Jack – but their recent activity has left it red and livid, one of the stitches popped and a small trickle of blood leaking down his side. A quick glance at her own skin shows an ugly red smear, and there's a comment there somewhere, his blood on her, but she ignores it.

"Your investment will live another day," he says without opening his eyes, his breaths slowing but the bite in his words remaining.

"Charles."

He looks up at her then, his head pillowed on his bent arm, the hard lines he wears so well smoothed out by the sated exhaustion that's always given her a rush. The rich brown of his skin only makes his eyes appear more pale, ghostly as they stare up at her with so many questions and no answers.

But whatever it is he's looking for, he brings his hand to her cheek, his rough palm settling against her soft skin as his thumb caresses her jaw, the gentle touch holding her captive. "I missed you," he finally says, and it's so quiet and so low she isn't certain he meant to say it. But then his eyes harden, and though he doesn't pull his hand away, his voice is cold when he adds, "But ask me to betray my men again, and I will cut your throat myself."

She wants to tell him he's a liar – he can no sooner harm her than give up his captaincy for a life of leisure – but he believes it in that moment, and while he might not actually kill her, she's always known Charles Vane is a dangerous man. So she nods, and she kisses his fingers when they move over her lips. She has no desire to blind herself to that side of him – good or bad, that side of him makes him the man he is.

Shrugging on one of his clean shirts as she rises, Eleanor pulls her skirt back on, making herself decent enough to retrieve a pitcher of water barely ten paces from the tent. "Stay there," she tells Charles, who only smirks in return.

Once she's back, Eleanor crosses to the basin, soaking a cloth and returning to his side after kicking off her skirt impatiently. He watches her, expression unexpectedly soft as she begins to clean around his stitches, carefully wiping away the grime and salt and blood, and he tells her what happened out at sea while she works, his hand in her hair. And for a moment, it's as if nothing has ever changed, and it should frighten her, but it doesn't.

And that's just as terrifying.


	5. Chapter 5

This chapter got really long. Ooops? Also, this chapter is where we catch up to the show, so some of the lines will be familiar.

* * *

For a time, they are at peace.

As much at peace as they can be, anyway.

The men mutter behind her back at first, but between Vane's steely stare and the sheer fact that his crew often catches wind of the best prizes before any of the others settles them in short order. With money to spare and the winds in their favor, the crew forget their resentments, forget that a woman is in charge of Nassau, forget that her whispers made Vane Captain.

She lets them forget.

She lets Charles forget.

She even, for a few very brief moments, lets herself forget.

But it's not like before.

Eleanor's machinations make her more powerful than ever, and with her power comes powerful friends. She's known Flint as long as she's been on the island, but though she's prepared for a lot, somehow she fails to account for Vane's captaincy resulting in a rivalry that begins to extend beyond prizes and seamanship – a rivalry that doesn't push them to do better, but hints toward sabotage and petty jealousies.

And she knows what Vane wants – he wants her to support him alone, to give Flint lesser leads until the man who earns her the highest profits is off the island. It's poor business, of course. Vane is good, but Flint is a legend, and she won't set the man down a rung simply because Charles is the one in her bed.

Because when it comes down to it, _that_ is the root of the problem. They've made each other no promises, and yet as the years have gone on, something in him has shifted, something that gives his possessiveness a sharp edge.

And Eleanor will not have it.

"You wanted me to be a fucking captain," he growls at her one evening, pacing her office like a caged animal. "Let me be a fucking captain."

It's the same tired argument, and she draws on her little surviving patience to remain in her hard-backed chair. When Charles entered her office this evening, freshly scrubbed for once and all his usual swagger firmly in place, she'd taken it to mean a good fucking was imminent – the dirty, biting, skin slapping fucking that they usually got up to in her office, the kind that would leave her aching pleasantly for days. The kind that started with locking her door, pushing him up against it, and taking him into her mouth before he had a chance to so much as say her name.

Or maybe he'd be in the mood for something different – Eleanor wouldn't mind if _he_ got on his knees again before her chair, spread her thighs and buried his mouth between her legs. There's something about that chair, and all the power she holds when she sits in it, that makes the whole experience even more pleasurable – something even more enticing than the bitten-off curses and mumbles she's reduced Charles to in this place more times than she can count.

And there's something all the more attractive about Charles when he doesn't give a fuck and gets on his knees anyway.

But that isn't why he's come to see her tonight. He came through the door worked up all right, but instead of shoving her skirts around her hips, he demanded to know why Flint had _his_ tip on a particular prize.

"This is ridiculous. You _are_ a fucking captain," she snaps back, slamming her hands down on her desk in a rare show of temper. They've been at it nearly an hour, and Eleanor is just about done with indulging this particular line of questioning. "You are _a_ captain. Flint is _a_ fucking captain. There are ten fucking captains on the beach besides you. You all bring in prizes. You all earn. So I must manage you all as I see fit."

The look he gives her is filled with loathing, the scar over his eye gleaming in the lamp light. "You don't fucking manage me."

"Don't I?"

Like so many other conversations of late, they arrive at an impasse. His hands curl into fists as he leans over her desk, his pale eyes glinting with seething rage, and they hold each other in place without touching. But in the end, it's his growl – he's the one to come around the desk, sweep his arm across it, and deposit her on it. And Eleanor doesn't stop him, because no matter how angry he makes her when it comes to business, she still wants him. But when they fuck on her desk, a furious, combative coupling that ends with bruises on her hips and bloody scrapes on his back, she can't help but wonder if he's trying to make a larger point with every brutal snap of his hips.

She can't help but wonder if it's his way of telling her she may think she's the one in charge, but he can still put her on her back any time he pleases – that when he stretches her arms above her head and takes hold of her wrists with one hand, it isn't a part of their usual erotic dance, but him exerting control over her in the only way she's ever allowed.

So the next time they fight about business, when she's grown tired of the argument, she sends him away before he can touch her. Charles stares at her, not bothering to hide his incredulousness at her command to get the fuck out, but in the end, his eyes narrow, and his jaw tightens. "Fuck you, Eleanor," he growls before stalking out.

Yet when the hour is late, Eleanor finds herself watching the beach. She's already stripped down to a silky dressing gown, a thing of beauty she kept for herself from one of the prize hauls, and there's a glass of rum in her hand. It should be peaceful, the quiet of the night and the soft rustling of the palms with the breeze off the bay – but the argument with Charles twists in her belly. They've argued plenty of times before, but there was something different about this, something that feels a bit like she's got one foot over the edge of a cliff, and it's up to her to decide whether she pulls back or jumps off.

Sending him away was the right thing to do. She needs to maintain the balance of power, needs to remind him that _she_ makes the decisions in Nassau, and she can't very well do that if in one breath she tells him to go fuck himself, and in the next opens her legs.

The creak of the door startles her out of her thoughts, but as it softly closes and familiar boots fall on the floor, Eleanor doesn't bother turning around. There's only one man on the island with the audacity to let himself into her bedroom at this hour, and she doesn't have the energy to toss him out again.

Charles doesn't say anything even as he steps up behind her, his chest warm against her back through the thin fabric of her robe, but he does slip his arm around her waist, tugging her closer. He lets his breath out slowly as he does it, not quite a sigh. Eleanor remains silent, not wanting to argue any more, but not willing to concede either. It's only when his free hand rises to her shoulder, his thumb rubbing gently beneath the thin silk, that she relaxes back into him, her hand rising to cover his on her hip.

There is no man who has ever managed to piss her off the way Charles Vane does, but there is also no man – no person – who she's ever felt this safe with. And maybe part of that is that he knows her well enough not to push her in this moment, not to demand anything she isn't willing to give freely; like so many times before, he's just _there_ , a steady presence at her back. He hasn't come to exert his dominion over her – he hasn't come to take or control.

So when she does turn in his arms, throwing back the last of her rum and setting the glass down on a nearby table, she isn't surprised to find him watching her with quiet intensity, something soft in his eyes where only hours ago there was vicious rage. He takes her hand, pressing it hard against his chest, his heartbeat strong under her palm, and Eleanor's breath catches in her throat when their eyes meet.

There's a question in the slight lift of his brow, but Eleanor ignores it, focusing instead on the slow drag of his thumb against her wrist where his hand still holds hers in place. Not in the mood to answer, she kisses him, her hand sliding up his chest and over his shoulder as she pulls him closer, her other palm flat against his jaw. His hands slip beneath her dressing gown, her name a soft sigh on his lips that she swallows with another kiss as silk falls to the floor with a whisper.

The dead of night has no use for captains or queens, and so Eleanor and Charles have those precious hours where they care only for each other, for heated skin, arched backs, and straining hips – where they can wrap themselves up in each other and ignore the enemy at the gate.

But it isn't long before the same tired argument repeats itself.

And so Eleanor sends him away, and this time, he does not come to her. She does not go after him. She clings to the certainty that giving in to her desires for Charles will weaken her position with him when it comes to business, that he will mistake her desire for weakness, and she won't have it.

So she tells him to get the fuck out, again.

And again.

And again.

And every time, he proves her right. He pays less attention to his crew and their brawling and murdering in the streets. The men aren't disciplined the way they were under Teach. Charles' form of discipline is as unpredictable as it is brutal, and though it keeps the men in line when he gives a command, he does nothing about the mayhem the crew of the _Ranger_ releases upon Nassau every time they set foot on the beach.

She ignores it, at first.

But then the street begins to mutter and whisper about them.

How his power is eclipsing hers. How the crew's behavior is an intentional _fuck you_ to Eleanor's rules of engagement, and she's powerless to stop it – Vane has shaken off her yoke, so why can't they?

How they can get another fence, and really, it's her father's company, isn't it?

Vane is the one on the seas with them. Vane wears the same scars they do. Vane is the captain.

And Eleanor Guthrie lets him fuck her whenever he pleases.

So she ends it.

-x-

To say that Charles is not pleased with her decision to no longer open her legs for him is an understatement.

A huge fucking understatement.

After she tells him it's over, he takes his crew and he leaves without saying a word. They're gone for weeks, and rumors reach her that they've gone north to the colonies in search of a prize. Eleanor is pleased when she hears it; she needs time to steel herself against him, and if he brings back profits, she can use that to her advantage. It's better for business if they're apart, and the proof will be there in the pieces of eight.

Except when he does return, flush with success, he tries to kiss her that evening in the tavern storeroom like nothing has changed.

So she pulls his own knife on him – the one he gave her on the beach more than a year ago, the one he taught her to use. There's something like amusement in his gaze as he glances down at the blade held to his throat, and he must be able to feel the tremble in her hand when he smirks at her. "Have it your fucking way, Eleanor," he says when she doesn't remove the knife.

"Fuck you, Charles," she spits back.

He watches her for another long moment, an all too intelligent gleam in his eye, but he leaves, a thin, angry line on his throat.

And Eleanor finds herself a distraction in Max one night after a bit too much drink, which suits her just fine in the end. She doesn't want another man – she won't be able to touch one or be touched by one without thinking of Charles. But Max is nothing like Charles; she's soft where he's hard, she gives where he takes.

And she firmly understands that Eleanor is the one with all the power.

But Max doesn't fuck her bent over her desk, and Max doesn't look at her like Eleanor is fire and she'd happily burn.

Max _does_ piss off Charles, and in the end, Eleanor is just petty enough to be glad of it.

"You've made your point," he growls late one night, the tavern nearly empty as he follows her into the small storage room where the rum is kept.

"Oh? What point is that?" she asks archly, tossing an annoyed glare over her shoulder before turning her attention back to the shelves of liquor in search of the bottle of rum she came for. She hardly has to ask – for a man so schooled at hiding his thoughts, his opinion on her dallying with Max has been plain for all to see.

"With the whore."

When she turns to laugh in his face, he's closer, and he braces his arms on the shelves behind her, effectively caging her in. He's drunk, the scent of rum strong on his breath, cigar smoke clinging to his clothes, but the way he's looking at her is far too intentional to be merely a result of drink. She can see it all in that moment – how determined he's been to wait her out, assured that Max is nothing more than a means to an end, and the slow, steady decline in his confidence that she would return to him all on her own.

It's a desperate breaking point that brings him to this room, out of patience and no longer able to stop himself from going to her because he needs her – not just wants, not just desires, but _needs_.

Eleanor knows this because whether she wants to or not, she's felt the same things – the uncontrollable, unreasonable jealousy, and the fierce, unrelenting desire for him. She's not stupid. Max has told her she cries out for Charles in her sleep, that she must exorcise his ghost if she ever truly wishes to be free of him.

And in that moment in the storeroom, a place they've been together a hundred times, Eleanor almost gives in, almost reaches for him, but she can't. She won't.

"Let me pass," she says quietly, the low tenor of her voice a threat in itself.

"Just fucking admit it. That girl doesn't care about you. She's using you. She's a fucking whore, Eleanor." He spits the words at her, his eyes narrowed and his rough voice low, but despite his anger, there's a thread of desperation running through his actions. He's never attempted to disguise how badly he wants her, how that want turned to need, and now, their bodies whispering against each other away from prying eyes, she knows his need is stirring up the ghost of her own.

So she slams that door shut once and for all.

"And you're a fucking pirate," Eleanor snaps, gritting her teeth and gripping the shelf behind her to keep her hands occupied. She might slap him if not – or she might grab a handful of his hair and yank his mouth down to hers.

Either would be disastrous.

"I've been a pirate since the day you met me."

"I'm not a stupid girl on a beach anymore, Charles. Get the fuck out of my place."

"That's the last thing you want. You _are_ that girl from the beach, and that girl was never stupid. You want me now as much as you ever have, and you hate it because I'm not a plaything you can control, despite all your efforts to the contrary."

"Jesus Christ, it is not all about you. My fucking world does not revolve around Charles Vane."

"You think you're happy now that you are in control, but it isn't what you really want," he continues as if she hasn't spoken. "Whatever pleasure you find in that whore's bed, when her soft hands touch you, it's not enough. We both know you've always…" He lets his voice trail off, eyes raking over her in such a manner she _knows_ he's thinking of her naked, and he wants her to know it. When he finally looks up, desire and shadows darken his stare as he rasps, "...liked it rough."

The longer he looks at her like that, his body close enough to feel the heat of him, the more insistent the throb of her pulse becomes. Eleanor steels herself against him, swallowing the rush of desire urging her to do something very, very stupid. "You sound fucking ridiculous," she says coldly. "Get the fuck out."

His eyes drop to her mouth, and lower, to where her breasts press against the buttons of her shirt with each rapid breath she takes. And for a moment, she thinks he's going to kiss her despite her threat. The way he's looking at her, the sway of his body toward hers, it all points toward him plunging his hands beneath her skirts like he has so many times before in this place, hauling her up against him and devouring her.

But whether it's the threat of violence in her voice or the simple fact that she's told him to leave, he goes.

-x-

"Sulking is not going to win her back, you know."

"Fuck you, Jack." Charles doesn't take his eyes off the woman in question, the lit lanterns making her hair shimmer in the dark and smoky tavern. She's happy tonight – fucking Flint returned with a prize his entire crew has been boasting about since setting foot on the beach – and despite knowing better, he can't take his eyes off her.

There was a time when Eleanor in a mood like this could have meant anything – moods like this turned into rowing out to the _Ranger_ , fucking in his quarters or on the deck, leaving him with the vision of her straddling him in his chair every time he sat down behind his desk for weeks. Moods like this turned into her tugging him down a dark beach, alone and away from the responsibility of Nassau and anyone who might see them, leaving their clothes in a heap on the sand and splashing into the ocean.

The memory of that night rises sharply to tighten his chest, an ache he's becoming irritatingly familiar with settling in his ribs as he remembers Eleanor's skin glowing in the moonlight. She tasted of the sea when he kissed her – the sea and the rum they shared on the walk to the private cove, her skin briney as he dragged his lips along her throat. It wasn't so hard to imagine where tales of mermaids and sirens had started that night; Eleanor in his arms, her hair streaming out in the water behind her while her laughter mingled with the crash of the waves, he'd follow _that_ woman anywhere.

It still isn't that hard to imagine, despite her being fully clothed and her hair in its usual utilitarian twist – she did lead him straight into the rocks, eventually.

"I don't suppose simply moving on with your life as she has with hers is an option?"

Charles takes his eyes off her long enough to glare at Jack. "Where's Anne?" The question is the only answer he's willing to give. Jack is clever. He'll figure out exactly what Charles means – the two of them have been inseparable since the day he met them. Were Anne to turn her back on him, were she even to start fucking someone else, Jack could no sooner turn away from her than Charles can give up the ghost of Eleanor Guthrie.

Nor does he say the rest of it as her laughter draws his gaze once more – Eleanor hasn't moved on. Max is a distraction, and perhaps she's come to care for the girl in her own fashion, but whatever lies between the two women is nothing compared to what he and Eleanor shared. Eleanor pays for Max, pays to keep her to herself; she is the one with all the power, and maybe that's what she thinks she needs to get over him, but he knows it won't work. He's told her as much and seen the truth of it in her eyes.

Fucking all the whores on the whole fucking island won't rid them of each other.

"Well, if you insist on pursuing Miss Guthrie, than perhaps a change in tactics is in order, if you'll allow me saying so. Continuing on in the same manner that caused her to reject your advances is sure to get you nowhere. Discover what it is she seeks elsewhere. Become that. Women are mysterious creatures. I suggest–"

"Finish that fucking sentence and it'll be your last," Charles snaps, but he can only hold Jack's eye for a moment before scanning the tavern once more. His friend isn't wrong – somewhere along the way, what Eleanor wanted from him changed.

Of course, if what she wants from him is obedience and subservience, she's never going to get it. The things he's done for her – the things he's given up for her – form a lengthy list, but on this, he will not yield.

And he won't have to. He knows Eleanor, knows that whatever she thinks she needs from the whore will in time prove false; he knows her ambitions and the way her mind works, but he also knows her passions. He knows that part of what has always brought them together is that they are people few others will challenge, that a part of Eleanor _likes_ that she can't control him. He knows this, because her wildness has always called to his – her utter disregard for what her father or anyone else feels her place as a woman ought to be has drawn him in from that first smirk on the beach all those years ago.

"You are the most loyal man I know, Charles, but she doesn't deserve it," Jack says eventually, tilting his glass and watching the rum catch the light before settling his far too earnest gaze on Charles. "She doesn't deserve any of it."

Across the room, Eleanor's laughter rings out once more, and she lays her hand on Flint's arm before turning back toward the bar. If Charles didn't already loathe the man, Eleanor's easy affection would have tipped the scales in an instant, and he shouldn't be jealous – Eleanor loves Flint, but it's the love she should have had for her father, nothing more – but all the same a fire burns in his belly that begs him to eliminate the other man.

And then there's a moment when Eleanor looks up, as though she can feel Charles' eyes on her. The pull between them is no less diminished after the months apart, but he expects her to look away, expects her to continue on with the same cold civility he's been afforded since he confronted her about Max. Instead, she hesitates, the smile still on her lips, warmth still in her eyes, and god damn him, it's hard to breathe when she's looking at him like that.

Jack is saying something, but Charles ignores him, his eyes steady on hers. It's a bit like it was in the beginning, the way they used to look at each other across a room, an entire conversation without a word, and when she takes a step closer he wonders if this is finally the moment she admits it – admits Max isn't enough, admits he's what she wants, admits that she was wrong to push him away, and things can go back to how they were.

But her expression shutters in an instant, any trace of warmth wiped clean until the cold mask he's grown used to is staring him in the face once more. She scowls at him, and then she turns away in a swish of skirts, her back rigid and shoulders high.

He watches her go, idly toying with the unlit cigar in his hand.

-x-

Charles doesn't try to kiss her again, but somehow, he finds other ways to maintain his place in her life.

He steps in when she doesn't ask him to, threatening those who threaten her. He uses his name and his vicious reputation to keep her enemies at bay. When a quartermaster refuses her terms, somehow Vane catches wind of it. His crew slips off into the night, but he's back by the next day, bloodied and so fucking pleased with himself as he logs the prize for the _Ranger_ in her books, not bothering to send his quartermaster. It's heavily implied that the man foolish enough to refuse her yesterday will never been seen or heard from again – Vane is practically gloating.

Mr. Scott at Eleanor's side is the only thing that keeps her from laying into the captain then and there, but since they have an audience, she merely informs him she can fight her own battles. He smirks and tells her he's protecting his business interests, same as her.

And so they fall into a curious sort of dance. He fucks whores and parades them through her tavern; she flaunts Max in his face every chance she gets. His crew becomes more and more reckless, harder to control, and Vane doesn't bother to try.

And perhaps it could have gone on like that forever, but Vane's rivalry with Flint morphs when he takes on Flint himself as his next target, and his interference in the other captain's affairs does not sit well with Eleanor, not one bit. Regardless of their personal spats, Flint is one of the highest earners on the island. She will not tolerate Vane fucking it up.

Especially since she's certain it has a lot more to do with her friendship with Flint than it does business.

So when she finally finds Vane, and he has the bloody nerve to act as though he's happy to see her, she punches him in the middle of the tavern for all the street to see, and doesn't ever consider him punching her back as the remotest of possibilities.

But he does – and like the smug bastard he is, he offers her a hand off the ground after he does it, still grinning like he's unearthed a secret stash of gold only he knows about.

Eleanor doesn't take his hand.

And she should know he would follow her, should know that he would stand far too close. She's barely washed her mouth out before he's standing there, watching her with something that smarts of amusement.

He reaches for her, and she should back away, but her emotions are all over the place, so when he tilts her chin to inspect his handiwork, she doesn't resist. A part of her already knows that half the reason he's come is the silent apology in his eyes – even if she also knows he didn't hit her as hard as he might have, and even if he had, no apology will ever pass his lips.

"Now, would you like to tell me what that was all about?" he asks mildly, as though he hasn't just smashed his fist into her jaw in the middle of the tavern.

As though he might honestly care why she's so upset with him – as though he's forgotten he once killed a man who punched her in the middle of the tavern.

But Vane's _caring_ is what got her in trouble in the first place, so she resorts to her usual mode of defense. She lashes out, and she threatens him, but somewhere along the way, Vane got wise to her. And he knows her soft spots, knows to poke at her insecurities about her father, because she fucking told him how she felt about the man – she told him a lot of things those nights laying in the dark twisted together as their blood cooled.

"If you ever challenge me again in front of my crew, I may just forget that I loved you once," he tells her as his parting shot, his eyes holding hers another beat before he disappears into the night, an echo of his threat all those months ago in his tent. And Eleanor stands there, her lip and jaw throbbing, watching him go with a heavy heart and the taste of blood on her tongue.

It's the first time he's admitted he loves – loved her – and it's the most honest thing he's said to her in a long, long time.

This time, she believes his threat.

-x-

The thing about Charles Vane – the thing that has always been true – is that he's been in her blood since the moment they locked eyes on that beach, and she's been in his.

So it's really of little surprise that he charms his way back into her good graces, his flippant teases and steadiness amidst the bickering men a reminder of everything she saw in him in the first place so many years ago.

Eleanor doesn't know how Jack gets him to agree to a partnership with Flint – Jack's flimsy lie that the whole thing was Charles' idea is as easy to see through as the water in the bay – but by the time they all sit down together in a hot, cramped room, she really doesn't give a fuck why Charles is there. It rapidly becomes clear that while Jack convinced Charles to do this, Mr. Gates has all but dragged Flint to the table kicking and screaming.

It's an odd reversal of roles, and when they finally take a break before someone ends up with a knife between their ribs, Charles gives her that damn look, his expression so light and innocent and _playful_ as he remarks on the surprise of him being the one to behave himself, she nearly forgets herself then and there. It's a glimpse of how things used to be between them, the moments he could make her laugh when no one else could, and her ribs groan under the sudden pressure in her chest.

But more than that, it's his willingness to _finally_ put his own fucking self interests behind those of Nassau – to put aside his ridiculous rivalry with Flint and actually rise above Flint's moodiness.

And she knows when he offers her his hand to seal their bargain, his eyes offering plenty more, that taking it cracks open a door she's long barred shut. He lingers just long enough to make his point, and then he's gone in a cloud of smoke, his boots steady and familiar on the floorboards as Jack scrambles to follow.

Barely an hour passes before she makes her decision.

It isn't even dark yet, but Eleanor doesn't give a shit. She doesn't give a shit who sees her, and she doesn't give a shit that after months of telling herself she doesn't want him, she does.

She wants the man who will never get down on his knees and tell her he loves her; she wants the man who will never ask her to run away – the man who understands her very life's blood is in this place, that she _can't_ leave.

The truth is, she's never really stopped wanting him. And maybe now, after so much has passed between them, just maybe, they've finally come to a place where they can be equals; maybe Charles _is_ finally starting to see that all she has ever wanted from him is to further the goal of an independent Nassau that isn't always one moment from burning itself to the ground. If he's willing to help her fight for their home, maybe allowing him back into her bed, her life, isn't such a bad thing.

So for a few precious hours, from the walk to his tent to the slide of his skin against hers, it's as if the months have fallen away. She can close her eyes and breathe Charles in. And while she'll never concede her power to him, while she'll never make herself lesser in anyone's eyes for a spot beside him, in the familiar shadows of his tent, with the torchlight alive in his eyes, she can forget the politics and power plays for a few precious moments.

She can remember that he loved her once – that everything about him screams he still does, that he loves her more in his own fierce, ruthless way than her father ever has. That he is a hard, brutal man who doesn't hesitate to kill when he deems it necessary, but can still kiss her hand so gently she can practically hear him offering her his love.

Until a single scream shatters the illusion so thoroughly, she wishes she could peel her flesh from her bones so that she doesn't have to know all the places he's touched her.

It should be enough to carve him from her heart; it _should_ paint him the villain he is with the blackest of hearts imaginable. For a time, it does.

Until she finds out the truth. Until she realizes that he was trying to spare Max while still maintaining his position with the crew – that if she hadn't come into his tent and distracted him, if she hadn't been so busy enjoying getting fucked by Charles Vane, either of them might have stopped it long before she did.

The mystery of why he stood there and let it happen, her skin still warm from his touch, why he _let_ her take his crew out from under him, is one she doesn't want the answer to. He could have hauled her away from the crowd, could have silenced her – but it would have been by force, and it would have destroyed her position to be so publicly set down by him.

And in that moment, Eleanor has to wonder if she really defeated Teach – or if he chose to go, to spare Charles the agony of a long, drawn out battle against his mentor.

But she should have known Charles would rise from the ashes of everything she burned down around him; she should have known that after months of rumors, some going so far as to claim him dead, one day she would find him exactly where she does, his fucking feet on her desk and that goddamn smirk of his firmly in place despite his bloody and beaten face.

Not that'll she'll ever admit her surprise when, rather than spend their entire meeting gloating, he chooses to recall the first time they locked eyes on that beach so many years ago, the start of everything that now lays between them. And then he has the nerve to stand across from her, behind _her_ fucking desk, look her straight in the eye, and tell her he misses the look on her face.

The look she knows damn well is steeped in fury, because he has outwitted her – but she wears her grim determination like a coat of arms, and she knows _that_ is what he's talking about. They're two sides of a coin, after all – both willing to stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

She strips him of his ship and crew, he strips her of the bay. He threatens her and she threatens him, and each time they get a little bit closer to truly damaging the other beyond repair.

But with Vane installed in the fort, she's forced to work with him – forced to see him far more often than she'd like. Forced to do things like go up there and scold him like a child, only to be baited into the same fucking argument.

Vane or Flint. Nassau or the freedom Charles sees in his way of things.

So of course he's there – _of course_ he's just finished telling her his _concern_ is for her; of course he's just finished lecturing her on the perils of her so-called tyranny and her inability to protect herself from the street when that fucking madman turns her place upside down.

It's hard not to think of another night, another time Vane stood silently at her back, not saying a word, not doing anything, really, but _there_. So it's no surprise, really, that she ends up in the fort, fucking _crying_ in Charles' room, begging him to save her despite the fact that she wraps it up in the tempation of a prize.

And no sooner does Mr. Scott ask her who she trusts than she receives her answer, loud and clear.

It's a gruesome love letter, but there's no mistaking it or his intentions. Where once Charles killed a man who insulted her and let the street mutter what it liked without ever saying a word, this time is different.

And when he tells her he didn't do it for her, she knows that for the first time in all the years they've known each other, he's lying. He protects the people he cares about, short as that list is, and he does it with an unflappable ferocity that has always been part of what's drawn her to him.

This isn't the first time he's killed for her. She knows as well as he does that if it had simply been about the prize, he would have pushed Ned Lowe's body into the sea with the rest of his crew – planting his head on a pike made it personal even without the note, and since the sadistic captain's only insults have been against her, there is no other conclusion to draw. Charles was happy to leave the street to its assumptions the last time, but this time he's not only claimed responsibility, but declared before one and all that anyone who threatens her will answer to Charles. Not with his cold stares and growl of a voice, but with their head.

And just like the first time, she shouldn't be glad of it – she shouldn't viciously want his skin on hers, to feel the life of him beating beneath her hands, all that raw energy and power and protectiveness she swears she doesn't need.

His darkness calls to hers, even as she lays in his arms, even as she feels the weight of his stare and all the emotion he won't give words or features.

Even as he shares his secrets with her, tells her his plans, _trusts_ her, and pulls her back into his bed.

Except when Eleanor finds herself standing on the other side of that gate in the bowels of the fort's tunnels, Charles wears his emotions plainly. With the glow of the torches on his face, his chest bare, he lays _himself_ bare. It is the most vulnerable she's ever seen him, and his words outside the tavern echo all around them – _a choice that's long overdue._

It's the first time he's put it to her so plainly – the first time he's voiced the question he's been asking her for years.

Where does her loyalty lie? Whose side is she on?

She doesn't choose him. And somehow she can't help but wonder if the universe is punishing her for turning her back on a man so deeply embedded in her bones when she finds herself on board a ship bound for England and the gallows, her father dead at his hand.

Her father who, if Charles is to be believed – Charles, who has done many things but with one obvious exception has not lied to her – was working against her with the English the entire time; her father, who didn't want a free, independent Nassau, but let her believe he was on her side.

 _And thus, as always, to traitors_.

Eleanor hates Charles for what he's done, but as the ocean shifts from clear turquoise to a deep, bottomless blue, she isn't sure if she hates him more for killing her father or for ruining what felt like her last chance to make peace with the man, to be accepted and perhaps even _admired_ for all she's accomplished in Nassau by her own flesh and blood.

Yet love and hate make curious bedfellows. It's a long voyage back to England, and Eleanor can do little but recite Charles' words over and over in a silent litany of rage and doubt, the last things he will ever say to her pinned to Richard Guthrie's corpse.

 _I was warned about you, warned you would betray me_.

And she had – more than once. It's what they do, after all. She'd told Max as much, in the cold numbness that was the aftermath of discovering her father's broken body. Everyone has always told her that her relationship with Charles is complicated, but it really isn't.

 _There is no part of this that is complicated. I crossed Charles, he retaliated. That is what happens in a war._

And they have been at war for a very, very long time.

So no, it isn't complicated. It's bloody and awful, and the depths to which they have both sunk are lower than she could have imagined, but it certainly isn't fucking complicated.

 _I'd hoped you and I shared enough to make such a thing unthinkable...but I know you too well, so I prepared in case they were right._

How like Charles – never once had the words _I love you_ passed his lips. It was only after the fact – a threat to forget he'd ever loved her, a macabre love letter pinned to her father who he'd executed – that he thought to tell her.

 _I'll be returning to Nassau to settle the rest of my accounts_.

Love and a threat and a promise all wrapped in one, the very definition of their entire relationship. But the thing is, Eleanor is on a fucking ship sailing to her execution, so when he returns to Nassau, she won't be there for him to _settle_ with. She won't be anywhere.

She thinks of his face the last time she saw him, the betrayal and hurt, the certainty that she'd left him to die for her decision to snatch the girl out from under him while his sweat was still drying on her skin. Betraying Charles had never been the point; it was a judgement call, the clearest path she saw that kept Nassau safe. But as the cold Atlantic waters pass beneath her, Eleanor beings to wonder if she should have gone along with his plan and remained in the fort with him, curled into his side in a pile of furs fit for a king.

Perhaps he is the savior Nassau needs; perhaps she's been standing in his way this entire time. Well, no longer.

"Goodbye, Charles," she whispers to the sea as the English coastline comes into sight weeks later, the salt air the last piece of him to be ripped away.


	6. Chapter 6

If not for the stern eye of Woodes Rogers at her back, Eleanor just might have kissed the beach when she finally sets foot in the Bahamas once more.

It's a relief to be back, to still have her head upon her shoulders and once again fill her lungs with fresh salt air after months confined in London's filth. It doesn't much matter they've dressed her up as a proper English lady, or that she's sold Vane out. It got her here, to this beach, and that's the important part.

He betrays her and she betrays him.

The cycle continues.

And the longer she spends with Rogers, everything she's ever wanted slowly coming to bear, she nearly convinces herself she's doing the right thing. Charles _did_ murder her father. He _is_ a creature of chaos – he thrives on the mayhem of piracy, the frenzy of battle. He is the eye of nearly every storm that has torn through her since she was thirteen years old, and no matter how many moments of endless blue sky he's represented, it doesn't change that he is a force of destruction.

She doesn't expect Charles to be captured. It is an event she does not predict and cannot reconcile when she hears it. So when she tells Rogers that she doesn't know how she'll react when confronted with her former lover after so much time and so many things between them, it's the honest truth.

The offer she brings to his cell feels like a lie.

She should have known Charles would bait her. Perhaps he thinks she still has his knife after all this time; perhaps he hopes she'll cut his throat and be done with it, save him the humiliation of a hanging.

A very dark part of her heart wonders if he isn't trying to goad her into killing him so that she'll never, ever forget him – so that he'll remain a raw, livid scar upon her soul until the end of her days.

As if he hadn't already branded himself over every inch of her.

But she doesn't expect him to reveal so much, and though she hates him in those moments, though she slams her fists against his face while he doesn't fight back, the truth of his words is already whispering to her.

 _He was a cowardly, selfish, treacherous shit who cared only for himself and for you not at all. You know this. All your life you knew this. Then suddenly he walks back through your door, tells you he can give you all of the things you want, tells you I'm your enemy, and, just like that, his love is sacred and mine is an inconvenient obstacle to your ambitions. The life cycle of your affections... A man you love who speaks the truth shunted aside in favor of the next who will tell you whatever you want to hear._

And there he is again, never saying those three words, but speaking of his love for her – and hers for him – as though it is a universal truth, the same as her father's treachery, which he describes in agonizing detail. Treachery she doesn't want to believe, yet Charles Vane has been many things to her over the years, but he still isn't a liar.

Eleanor hurls the worst insults she can find at him and she leaves, cradling her bloody knuckles to her chest. And she manages to hold it together long enough to get out of sight of the guards, and that's where she breaks down with cold, rough stone at her back, tears streaming down her cheeks because god fucking damn him, she knows in the marrow of her bones he isn't lying. Not about his assessment of her – and not about the terrible offers made by the one man who should have protected her above all else.

Her father didn't deserve to die at his hand. She doesn't know that she can ever forgive him for that – but it also becomes frighteningly clear that she can't let him hang for it, either. Because no matter how hard it is to hear, nothing Charles said to her is a lie. She _has_ seen his love as an inconvenient obstacle nearly from the moment she recognized the emotion in his eyes – and she _has_ run away when he's told her an unpleasant truth.

And she definitely doesn't give a shit that he's a pirate.

 _What have I done?_

And she knows then, knows that she can't allow this to happen. She can't stand idly by while Charles dies, can't watch him board a ship for a journey that concludes at the end of a rope. She won't. So she hunts down Billy Bones and what remains of Flint's crew, and she finds a way to stop it.

-x-

Eleanor never goes back to Woodes Rogers.

It's a shame to leave her things behind, the relics of her old life she's never been able to fully part with. Where she's going, her leather jacket and well-worn skirts would come in handy, but she can't risk it. Her journal is a harder blow, the secrets she's scribbled likely to be exposed to Rogers and Mrs. Hudson in short order, but there's nothing to be done about it now.

After a terse, whispered conversation with Billy, Eleanor is promptly smuggled on board a waiting ship. As it turns out, the crew _did_ have a plan to intervene on Charles' behalf, and with a few adjustments from Eleanor, it just might work.

But it will put the same price on her head as his, and so she cannot remain in Nassau.

She's left to wait in the captain's quarters, the ship rocking gently beneath her feet in a ghastly reminder of the long weeks at sea to and from England, each a nightmare of its own speciality. On the first, the horror and dread of a public hanging; on the second, the low misery of having sold out the man she– having sold out Charles.

The hours she waits for news of the rescue attempt feel longer than both journeys combined.

The heart-stopping fear of losing any of the men who've become her family in the absence of her father all these years is unfamiliar and entirely unwelcome; she's long since come to realize her father walked out on her far before Charles strung him up in the fort. And yet, despite all of that, when she wonders what he will have to say to her after everything, especially after their last meeting in his cell, she wants to race above decks and empty the contents of her stomach overboard.

Not for the first time, Eleanor can't decide if she hates him – or if she's been in love with him for a very, very long time.

-x-

The movement of the ship wakes Eleanor from her exhausted doze, the rocking beneath her feet more pronounced. They've left the harbor, and though the slap of the waves and the _thunk_ of boots on boards reaches her, the familiar shouts of the men have gone silent. They must still be close to Nassau. That's good. She can't have been asleep long, dawn still hours off by the inky sky visible through the stern windows.

"I should have believed you when you told me you'd remove me from that place, no matter the consequences." He laughs, a bitter, dark sound. "And I promised you I'd return, so here we are."

Eleanor jerks her head around, shocked to find Charles sprawled in a chair mere feet away. That she slept through his entrance is concerning enough, but the flood of relief and the urge to go to him, to touch him and make sure he's real, that's even worse. Yes, he does in part have her to thank for ensuring the rescue effort actually fucking worked, but after all that's been between them, it's hardly appropriate for even a sliver of need to work its way into her veins when it comes to one Captain Charles Vane. The ache in her knuckles should remind her of that if nothing else.

She doesn't apologize for her offenses, and he doesn't apologize for his. They are not an apologizing sort of people.

Dried blood darkens his face, his eye swollen and horribly discolored from the beating she inflicted upon him hours earlier, a ragged bandage still tied around his thigh where Rogers shot him. Eleanor's glance drops to her own bruised and torn knuckles before returning to him. "I couldn't let you die," she finally says, because it's the truth, and she's too exhausted to bother with deception – too exhausted to remember the steps to this endless dance between them.

"Feeling guilty for beating a man in chains?" he asks mildly, steely blue eyes hard as ice in the dim cabin, his even tone fooling neither of them. He doesn't so much as shift his weight in his chair, his stillness and quiet voice doing nothing to diminish the waves of silent, seething rage radiating from him.

"You murdered my father," she snaps back instantly, her shoulders tensing and her temper flaring, even if she knows before the words have fully left her mouth that it isn't the reason she's upset with him – in some deep, dark part of herself, she understands why Vane did it.

But she doesn't want to.

"Your _father_ –" the words rip from his lips with a particularly vicious snarl "–spent your entire life dangling his affections before you like a fucking prize you could never win." Vane leans forward, his elbows on his knees and his attention fully on her, the swaying lantern casting a glow over his bloody face that makes him a creature of nightmares brought to flesh, his eyes hard. "I am many things, Eleanor, but I have never tolerated traitors – or anyone using you ill. Not even your fucking coward of a father."

"Except you," she spits, her temper rising despite herself. It wasn't that long ago they were in that cell, and the things they said to one another are too fresh to open this door again, but here they are.

His eyes widen slightly, his lips pressing into a hard line. "What the fuck did I ever do to you? I loved you, Eleanor. You destroyed me every fucking chance you got. You left me for dead that night in the fort, and you came today with a fucking _offer_ you knew I'd die before accepting. Nothing I said to you was a lie, and you knew it then as much as you know it now. You took your anger at yourself and your father out on me anyway, and then had the audacity to call me an animal. Let's not pretend your _efforts_ this evening somehow change those facts."

The words spill out of him, one after the other, in a torrent of speech that is rare for Charles, but the confessional mood from the fort lingers, curled up in the crooks of their anger at one another. "You think you didn't ruin me?" she asks, an accusation and a confession of her own. Her hands remain resolutely at her sides, but Eleanor clenches them into tight fists. It isn't in her nature to admit such a thing, but she's already shown her hand by participating in his escape – she's chosen his side. Perhaps finally having it out with him over everything – all the power struggles, the betrayals, the knives in the dark – maybe that will finally give her a sense of peace she hasn't felt in a very, very long time.

Maybe that's the path back to standing alone with him on an empty beach and feeling like they could survive anything together.

He doesn't answer, regarding her in silence with his unnerving stare. Eleanor doesn't know where they go from here, or what she even wants from Charles Vane other than for him to not be dead, and from the look on his face, he's of a similar mindset.

Jack bursts in before either of them can find the next thing to say, his glance skittering over to Eleanor before falling on Charles and staying there. "Thank you," he says, crossing the room and standing before his once-captain, the words painfully earnest. Jack has never had Charles' talent for deception or mastery of his emotions, and Eleanor envies him in that moment, his ability to so openly show his relief at finding Vane alive. "I-I'm not certain how to–"

"Don't make a big fucking production of it, Jack." But when Charles smiles up at his friend, his lip cracking open again to shimmer with blood in the glow of the lit lamps, she sees the love between the two men that has always been there, and always will be. They are brothers as much as those born sharing the same blood, and while losing Charles may have felt like ripping her heart out, for Jack, it would be as if he'd lost a limb.

The look that passes between the two men says all that and more.

It's then that Jack seems to remember he and Charles are not alone. "Why the fuck is she here?" Jack's relief and happiness are short-lived as he scowls at Eleanor. "Anne is going to–"

"Eleanor is none of your concern. Or Anne's." Charles' growl echoes through the room, his rough voice a threat unto itself. He is no longer smiling. "I will settle my own accounts."

She shivers at the echo of his letter, and she's known Charles for far too long to think it's anything but intentional that he's chosen those exact words. The way his pale eyes flicker toward her before returning to Jack, his jaw tightening, only confirms it.

"We'll leave Miss Guthrie to her evening." Charles lurches to his feet, his usual grace not quite so steady as he makes his way toward the door. But he stops with his hand on the knob, leveling a hard look at her over his shoulder. "If you know what's good for you, you'll keep your mouth shut and remain out of sight."

Eleanor nods, swallowing hard at the obvious threat as Charles opens the door, lets Jack out first and then turns his back on her.

-x-

It's late and he should be asleep, but Charles finds himself at the rail, watching the moonlight on the waves. The ship is quiet, most of the crew in their hammocks at this hour, and Charles leans back against the rigging. Smoke spills out of his mouth in a cloud of too many emotions to sort through.

He's tired. He doesn't really give a shit how he feels – he'd rather not feel anything at all.

He especially doesn't want to feel a fucking thing for Eleanor Guthrie.

"I thought I might find you here."

It's all he can do to stifle a groan at Jack's voice, but his friend carries a bottle of rum, and Anne is not with him, so Charles merely glances at him before directing his attention back to sea.

"We really must discuss the Guthrie woman, Charles. You're aware she's the reason you were nearly shipped back to London to meet the hangman's noose, yes? Why is she on this ship? Why are we taking her with us when she deserves to rot in Nassau?"

Charles ignores Jack, savoring the breeze and the steady slap of the waves on the hull as he brings the cigar back to his lips. The sea is his home, and despite Jack's rambling, there's peace in these waters. A part of him wondered if he'd ever walk freely on a deck again as the hour grew late and he remained in that cell, his leg throbbing, his face bloody. To be here, to do as he pleases once more, it's a balm on his bruises.

It lets him forget, for a moment, the unexpected surge of emotion Eleanor's grief for her father brought out in him only hours ago. The instinct to shelter her from pain isn't one he's easily rid of no matter what they've done to each other.

He did execute her father. The bastard deserved it, and though he knows Eleanor thinks it was an act of retaliation against _her_ , Charles didn't kill the man for revenge.

Charles killed Richard Guthrie because he was a traitor to Nassau – and because he offered up his only daughter to a man he believed to be an animal to save his own pathetic hide. The cold ruthlessness of rage was still upon him when he wrote the letter he knew Eleanor would find, when he assured her he would return to settle his accounts, and he hadn't just been talking about her father when he'd written his warning.

 _Thus, as always to traitors._

But months later, after they've both come far too close to the end of a rope, he can't ignore the effect Eleanor's pain has on him, has always had on him. It doesn't matter that Richard Guthrie never did a single fucking thing in his entire worthless life to deserve Eleanor's grief – there is still a part of Charles that wants to go back into that cabin and take her pain away.

"You can't possibly be thinking of allowing her near you again, after everything she's cost us, everything she's cost _you_. Christ, Charles, I know I pushed you into mending things with her in the past, but we don't need her anymore. You don't need her. She's a traitor."

Charles turns to look at Jack, eyes narrowing against the wind. Jack isn't wrong – he shouldn't feel a goddamn thing for Eleanor – but he's not right either. Eleanor is a lot of things, but to call her a traitor forgets that in her mind, she has always been true to Nassau. Not herself. Not him. Not fucking Flint. Nassau. And he doesn't much care for it, would prefer she had chosen him a long time ago, but it doesn't make her a traitor.

Jack sighs, bringing the rum bottle to his lips before offering it to his once-captain. Charles accepts, rum and smoke on his tongue, the ashes of days gone by. He knows Jack isn't through, not by a long shot, but it's pointless to argue with him. He'll say what he has to say, and then he'll shut up.

"The crew are not fond of her, you know. Even before this whole mess with Rogers, ever since that terrible evening on the beach, the street hasn't much liked her. It was one thing for her to parade about with her rules and her terms, but when she robbed us of our ship…" Jack laughs, gesturing vaguely. "The street turned on her, and she never truly won them back."

"Make your point."

"When all this started, I told you she was dangerous, Charles. It's more true now than it ever was then."

"She has no power here."

"Certainly not in the way she once did, but she still has power over you, and you allow it."

"Fuck you, Jack." Charles tips the rum bottle back, drinking deeply and savoring the burn of the liquor. He hopes that's to be the end of the conversation, that Jack has now said what he came to say – to tell a truth Charles has long known – but he lingers, plainly not through.

"If you won't kill her, then–"

"Anyone who harms her will answer to me." His gaze steady on the water, Charles tightens his grip on the rum bottle, cursing his own weakness. This is what got him in trouble in the first place, isn't it? Demanding answers for slights to a woman he's loved so long, he's forgotten what it is to not have her bumping drunkenly about in his head, a trail of destruction left in her wake.

So many things he's done for her – stood by her side, sacrificed his standing with his crew, defended her – and still, he is somehow the villain in her story. The things he said to her in that cell needed saying, were long overdue, and he should have known she would lash out as she did – but it didn't make anything he told her less true.

He knows it, and from the look on her face when she opened her eyes to find him waiting for her on this ship, she knows it, too. Charles doesn't want to hope that her decision to interfere on his behalf, to finally fucking choose him, somehow means anything; he's known her too long to accept her at face value.

 _You think you didn't ruin me?_

She hurled the words at him like an accusation, but for Charles, it's vindication – an acknowledgment that all these years he hasn't been the only one who's been trampled beneath this thing between them. That he is in her blood as surely as she's in his, that despite her cold edicts and insistence he is nothing to her beyond a means to an end, she can no sooner shake him than he can her.

It's the sort of night where old ghosts are close to the surface, slipping through the veil to dance along the black ocean as Jack finally falls silent beside him. Unbidden, he recalls Max asking him if he wanted to know how to stop caring for Eleanor. He hadn't hesitated in his answer, despite what it revealed to the scheming whore, and despite all the reasons he should have changed his mind by now, he hasn't. He didn't need Max's answer then, and he doesn't need it now – he already knows the truth.

The only way he'll stop caring for that woman is if he carves out his own heart.

There's nothing he can do about that. He's tried and fucking tried to rid himself of her mark – Teach was right about that much – but he'll be damned if he'll let his emotions lure him back into her web.

Charles glances over at Jack, frustration with Eleanor boiling in his blood. It's the wrong moment for Jack to frown at him like that, that curious mix of pity and worry that has always irritated him, and tonight it overrides his reason. "Fuck you, Jack," he tosses over his shoulder as he walks away, taking the rum with him.

Sleep is a long time coming.

-x-

Eleanor doesn't see Charles again until her feet touch the sand of Maroon Island, and even then, it's merely a brief exchange of glances across a bustling beach. She nearly looks away, but an echo of the girl she once was, the woman she once was, straightens her spine and pulls her lips into a small, private smirk.

He doesn't smile back, and after a long moment, he turns away, his expression undecipherable.

Preparations for battle occupy them all, but even when it's inevitably time to sleep beside a fire or force a bit of food down her throat, Eleanor doesn't see Charles. He isn't lurking at the edge of the flames, one eye on the men and the other on her, intelligence and desire sparking together like they have nearly the entire time they've known one another.

It's a bit like losing a limb after all.

Eleanor hardly knows what to make of it, the gaping chasm that opens within her chest. In all the years she's been...involved...with Charles, he's always been there, a simmering flame low in her belly. Sometimes she burned with hate, others with desire and lust, and yet others with...something else entirely.

But on the island, preparing for a battle that may see them all dead, his absence snuffs the flame out entirely.

Eleanor isn't sure it will ever return. Isn't sure she wants it to.

Isn't sure she can survive without it.

But between the preparations and the passing of Mr. Scott – never mind the mental clusterfuck that is discovering Scott's wife and daughter she's long believed dead are very much alive – there is no time for Eleanor to tend to personal matters. And despite the urge to seek Charles out, there's a part of her that wants to continue avoiding him the rest of her days.

He makes her weak.

When he said she'd destroyed him, she knew in her bones he wasn't entirely wrong. The Charles Vane Eleanor knew wasn't the man in chains she met that afternoon, not really. Oh, he bore the tongue of the pirate she grew up beside, his intelligence and ability to drive for the sorest point undiminished – but he didn't make a single move to defend himself from her beating.

At the time, it only made her angrier, only drove her to hit him again and again and again. But looking back, she can't help but wonder if his behavior wasn't so different, after all. Yes, he punched her in the middle of her own tavern once, but hadn't she struck first?

She knows he pulled the punch – and she knows if they'd been alone, he wouldn't have touched her, despite his many, many threats over the years. He's never hit her before or since, no matter how much she pushed his temper to the brink, knowing full well how dangerous and violent he's capable of being – knowing she has never been some English miss in a London tearoom baiting a man with a reputation for sin. Nassau isn't bound by any sense of propriety that would shield her from violence simply because of her skirts, and even if it was, she's spent so long among the men, just as crude, just as ruthless, that she hardly thinks any of them would consider her a _lady_.

She didn't pull a single punch when she hit Charles, though.

It's a simple fact – and a commentary on their relationship from the very beginning.

Where once the thought would have made her proud, in the deep darkness that slinks beside her as she walks through the camp, it's a punch to the gut. Eleanor has to stop, leaning against one of the palms and pushing sweaty strands of hair off her face as she struggles to catch her breath.

She's trapped herself in this mess, and she may not want to admit it, but with the jungle at her back and the night still around her, Eleanor's defenses fail her.

The deal with Rogers kept her alive, allowed her to come back to Nassau, and she doesn't regret that. She did what she had to in order to survive, and though she knows in her heart Charles would have let them hang him before he'd turn on any of them – even Flint – Eleanor isn't ready to die. No, that choice, terrible as it is, that isn't the one that haunts her and dogs her heels.

It's everything after that. It's telling Rogers she loved him, words she's spoken to no one else, words that belong to another. It's not using her first opportunity to escape, not noticing sign after sign that all her precious legitimacy came at a steep cost until it was very nearly too late. It's that she ignored the voice in the back of her head whispering that if she could find Charles, he would see her safe, despite all that's passed between them, despite the hatred she still held in her heart for the murder of her father.

Charles is the only one who has never tried to change her, never tried to cage her; he's never sought to make her lesser to prop himself up. And she knows now with crushing certainty that he was content to be at her side, an equal – _she_ was the one who always had to stand a step higher.

"We'd be doing him a favor if we just kill the cunt."

Eleanor has been so lost in her thoughts she hasn't noticed the approaching steps, but Anne Bonny's voice cuts straight through her. With a whispered curse, Eleanor darts into the trees as quickly and silently as she can, grateful all over again to Madi for the shirt and skirt she can actually move and breathe in.

She should have known better than to accept Woodes Rogerss from the moment he had her stuffed into a corset.

"He won't see it that way." Jack sighs, the rustle of clothes floating through the night as the couple stops on the path. She can't see them, but Eleanor would know their voices anywhere.

And they're talking about murdering her.

"He doesn't see clearly at all when it comes to that bitch, especially not with her on this fucking island. If we don't do something, he's going to end up right back in the middle of her shit. Christ, Jack, she nearly had him hanged!"

"I know." Jack's voice is unexpectedly soft, and there's a long pause before he continues, "But he's forbidden anyone from laying a hand on her. It's his debt to collect, he says. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a pointless argument. He won't be swayed. The best thing we can do is watch his back."

"And when she fucks him over again? When she fucks _us_ over again? She uses people. First Charles, then Max, then Charles again." Anne pauses when Jack says something too low to decipher, but whatever he's said, her tone only grows more vicious – Eleanor can practically see the bloodlust in the other woman's eyes. "She was fucking Rogers, you know. She's going to bring the whole fucking lot of them down on us because she can't pick one person to fuck and be done with it."

"Let us hope it doesn't come to that."

"Fuck you, Jack."

Eleanor holds her breath as the conversation stops, but Anne's quiet steps are quickly followed by Jack's crashing after her, his voice rising to call her name until they both fade out of hearing. Eleanor sags back against the palm as she gets to her feet, her unintentional eavesdropping only turning her mood blacker.

How did she get to be this person? How did she and Charles end up here, after everything? To learn that he's forbidden anyone from touching her is a momentary comfort, but Eleanor can't help but wonder if he's made the decree simply so he can do it himself, if she's finally pushed him so far that all of his threats have come to fruition.

Maybe it's what she deserves. Poetic justice and all that – if she finally chooses Charles and ends up with a slashed throat or worse, well, there's some sort of irony in that. Anne isn't wrong, entirely. Eleanor thought choosing Woodes Rogers would give her the life she swore she wanted, and she'd done her damnedest to convince herself it was the right choice – even if she'd known before he'd even rolled off her the first time they'd fucked that it was all wrong.

So many wrongs trailing after her, regrets clutching her skirts and skittering along the sand in her wake. It's exhausting, it's _been_ exhausting, but it's nearly dawn by the time she falls into a restless sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

The night before the battle, the island hums with energy and anticipation. Eleanor has lived with the pirates for so long that it's almost familiar, the sense of danger and the taste of an excitement that borders on fear.

But there is no mistaking how high the stakes are – no forgetting that tomorrow's battle will see a number of them dead. So as the sun goes down and the final preparations are made, some find solace in the bottle, while others seek out the pleasures of the flesh.

And Eleanor? Eleanor hates herself for it, but she seeks out Charles.

She finds him alone at the edge of a fire sharpening his sword, his head bent to the task. The rasp of the stone against the blade rings out in the quiet of the night, drowning out the pop of the fire and the rustle of the palms. The sight of him like this in the seconds before he realizes she's there is achingly familiar, a reminder of all the nights in the camp in Nassau, and Eleanor's breath catches. There are very few times she's ever seen the man truly relaxed, and he's not that now, all controlled chaos in the flickering light, but he's comfortable in this world – there's an ease to him sharpening his blade as he has a thousand times before.

"What the fuck do you want?" he asks without looking up. With his hair pulled back so severely from his face, Eleanor can see his jaw tighten and his shoulders rise with his words.

The answer rests on the tip of her tongue, but she can't bring herself to say it – can't bring herself to admit that on the eve of battle, when either of them might die here, she doesn't want to be alone. That she has been alone for nearly her entire life, and the only times she hasn't _felt_ alone have been in his arms.

But she doesn't have the right to say that, not now, not with things between them so broken. And even if she did, Eleanor Guthrie doesn't say sentimental nonsense like that, and definitely not to Charles Vane. He murdered her father and she nearly got him hanged. Eleanor doesn't know how they move beyond that, how to reconcile the hatred and desire and need at war within her. She just knows that after so many years of walling herself into a solitary prison of one, the months she spent in an actual cell along with the days spent trapped within the confines of a life she thought she wanted but could never really embrace, tonight of all nights, she needs something other than her regrets.

Charles looks up when she doesn't answer him, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the fire. The bruise on his face is all but gone, though she knows the wound in his leg isn't yet fully healed.

The gunshot from Rogers – the capture that wouldn't have happened if she hadn't sent Hornigold after them in a blind and stupid attempt to avoid the wrath of the Spanish. Yet another scar he'll bear from her, a permanent reminder of the destruction she leaves in her wake.

"Eleanor." Her name slips off his tongue in a sigh, weary and laced with regrets. The hostility of his greeting moments ago is gone, as though the effort of sustaining his anger is too much. "Go to bed."

"Come with me."

He laughs, a short, sharp burst of noise that nearly drowns out the whisper of steel on leather as he sheaths his sword and gets to his feet. "Why the fuck would I do that?" The words are no doubt meant to be harsh, but as the question rolls off his tongue, he seems to be asking himself the question as much as her.

"Charles." He's close enough that she can reach out and touch him, her fingers fisting in his shirt and pulling him closer. She expects a fight, but he lets her pull him in, his expression unreadable as he watches her. Anger roils beneath his skin, but that's not all she sees staring back at her.

Still, he remains silent, a battle brewing in his cool blue gaze. Him wanting her, her wanting him, that's never been their problem, and nothing about that has changed. Still, the way his eyes flick over her might as well be the same as his gaze on a storm building in his path – a danger to be sure, but one that might be worth it.

He eventually raises his hand, brushing his fingers over her jaw in a move that could be tender if it didn't come with a razor sharp look of warning. He doesn't need to speak for Eleanor to understand what he's telling her, and when he turns for his tent, she follows.

Charles still doesn't say anything once they've stepped into his tent, but he does reach for her, his grip tight and familiar, and fuck, she's _missed_ this. The urgency and the need, the taste and smell of him. She knows it's only happening because of what the dawn brings, knows that even Charles, fearless and battle-hardened as he is, understands that tomorrow's fight is no ordinary fight. Eleanor has to believe he'll survive it – she didn't get him out of that cell for him to die on this fucking island not even a week later – but the odds aren't exactly stacked in their favor.

She feels the change in him, the moment where whatever part of himself he's holding back snaps, and then he kisses her, _really_ kisses her, lifting her into his arms as her legs circle his hips and her palm presses against his jaw. She swallows his groan, digging her fingers into his shoulder as he takes the few steps needed to lay her back on the narrow bed, his body quickly covering hers.

Their eyes catch as he peels off his shirt, and Eleanor breathes out, struggling to keep silent, knowing instinctively that if she says one fucking word he'll walk away from her tonight. This is not forgiveness, and it's not a truce – it's a temporary reprieve in the middle of a war, a few snatched moments in which the complications of their lives fade, and there is nothing but his body and hers.

Charles holds her stare for one breath, then another, and it's a rare thing for his thoughts to be so plain on his features. Eleanor has learned to read him after all these years, has learned the nuances that are Charles Vane's tells, but tonight it's obvious. It's all there – the rage and betrayal and desire and something that looks a lot like fear.

But then he looks away, his gaze dropping to her body, and after the slightest hesitation, he begins to work open the buttons of her shirt, and in short order their clothes form a heap off the side of the bed. Whatever else is between them in that tent, Eleanor shoves it aside and concentrates on the slide of his skin against hers, the rasp of his scruff against her throat and the inside of her thighs, the press of his lips and the sweep of his tongue. She focuses on the taste of him, the contrast of hard muscle and soft skin, the way his hips strain under her hands and his breath catches.

Nothing about it is gentle or soft or tender. With a year apart and a mountain of sins between them, Eleanor hardly expected anything less, but she _didn't_ expect Charles to reveal so much of himself. Maybe he's too tired to notice, or maybe he's too tired to care – or maybe it's just that as terrible as this thing between them can be, it's always been honest. The constant simmer of anger beneath his skin boils over, and he's not selfish, and he's not hurting her, but his teeth scrape across her skin more than his lips. He drags her arms above her head, pressing her wrists down to keep her in place, his breath harsh against her throat until she throws her weight against him. And just like so many times before, when she pushes on his shoulders to keep _him_ down, he smirks, a defiant, smoldering look, and merely drops his hands to her hips to resume his iron hold.

There was a time when his blatant bid for control would have made her smile, when she'd have thrown her head back and laughed even with him inside her, but nothing about Charles tonight invites her laughter. Instead she drives harder against him, gritting her teeth and grinding her hips down, determined to give pleasure as much as take it.

That same determination lives in his eyes when she glances down, her breaths coming in pants and every muscle in her body tightening in anticipation. There's something almost cold about the way he looks at her in that moment, as though she's a battle to be won, but she can't think about that now – except when he reaches between them to roughly push her over the edge, she catches a flash of loathing in his eyes right before her eyes snap shut to ride out the waves of pleasure.

He doesn't give her any time to recover, taking advantage of her distraction to roll them back over and bury himself deep. It's almost too much until it's not, the slap of his skin against hers nearly as loud as their breathing. His eyes glitter in the dim light, a question there she knows he'll never ask, and then he leans down to kiss her, a sloppy, messy kiss that tastes of desperation and despair.

He rolls off of her when it's over, her body humming with pleasure and her breaths still short as her mind tries to reconcile everything that's just passed between them. It's impossible to miss the almost brutal determination to find pleasure in each other – from both of them – or the heavy weight of emotion in the air that neither of them were prepared for.

Eleanor wanted to forget, just for a little while. And instead everything about the last half hour – every terribly familiar touch and breath – reminds her that the life she once had is gone.

She should probably go, but Charles still hasn't said anything beyond the curses he bit off in the midst of their pleasures, so she lets her fingertips brush against his, a gesture easily ignored if he wishes to. She hopes he doesn't – hopes that despite knowing one fuck doesn't solve anything, he'll show her a trace of the affection she took for granted for so long.

Still, it's a surprise when he rotates his wrist, spreading his fingers with his palm open to her hand. She takes his invitation, watching in wonder as he kisses the back of her hand. He turns toward her as he lowers their hands, his grip loose but still there, and the look he gives her is another warning – a warning that this changes nothing, that when the sun rises, all will not be well between them.

But for tonight, he will once again be her port in a storm, and she his; for tonight, the ghost of a love they never spoke of but once shared will be allowed one final goodbye.

He doesn't ask her to leave – he doesn't say anything at all. And when she wakes in the pale blue pre-dawn light, he's already gone.

-x-

For all the months and weeks of plotting and maneuvering, when the battle happens, it's over within an afternoon. Teach and his crew arrive a day ahead of Rogers' forces, one of Jack's maneuvers, and the additional men are quickly absorbed into the plan. The British arrive expecting a small, bedraggled band of pirates, and are instead greeted with a roiling rage of men and women who've long lost their patience with chains.

Eleanor is meant to stay with the other women, but whatever sense of self-preservation has kept her in line the last week on the island comes to an abrupt end when she sees Scott's daughter leave the safety of the hidden caverns. Ignoring the looks of those around her, she holds her head high and joins her, because Eleanor Guthrie does not fucking hide from battle of any sort.

The scowl she receives from Silver tells her she is not welcome, but he hands her a gun all the same. The heavy shotgun in her hands makes her feel more like herself than she has in a very long time.

The queen of thieves left Nassau bound for trial in London, but the woman who came back hasn't been the same. Her time in shackles crushed her, weakened her, and as the world begins to explode around her, she can't help but think of the brand on Charles' shoulder and the deep lashes across his back.

He never let shackles weaken him – why has she?

But in the end, their – _Silver's_ – plan works brilliantly, and the attack on the settlement lasts moments. The sacrifices of the contingent mowed down on the beach to lure the British into the jungle, and Silver's clever twist on Flint's plan, leave the jungle strewn with scraps of red fabric, blood soaking the earth.

Eleanor follows Silver and Madi once the guns and screams have gone quiet, and she's only paces behind when Flint crests the ridge on the other side of the stream bordering the settlement, blood and grit smeared across his skin. Charles is beside him, and somewhere along the way the bit of leather that usually holds his hair back from his face has been lost. They paint a savage picture, the madness of battle still riding Flint's eyes, while Charles is all terrifyingly cold ruthlessness, a long spatter of blood across his cheek.

The fact that the two captains still hate each other – respect, but hate nonetheless – only makes them more powerful standing side by side.

Her eyes lock with Charles', and there's a breath where the world stops around her. There is no warmth in his expression, no softening of the bloody brutality dripping down his sword, but it's _familiar_ and lord help her, she's so fucking glad he's not dead she doesn't care who he's killed.

"Hornigold is dead," Flint calls across the stream, and Eleanor's glance shifts to the other captain. His expression betrays nothing, but Eleanor has known him a long time, and she knows what the death costs him. And she feels it too, the pang of remorse for a man she once knew and respected, but they've made their choices and now must live or die by them – and Hornigold was a dead man the moment he sold her out to the English.

 _And thus, as always, to traitors._

It's Charles' voice in her head, an echo of the words he once wrote about her father, and a shiver runs down her spine as the steely blue of his stare snares her once more. She can't help but think she isn't the only one reflecting on those words, that the flicker in his expression isn't just a figment of her imagination.

So much pain between them, so many betrayals, and with the acrid smell of gunpowder mingling with the copper of blood around her, suddenly Eleanor can't manage the rift between them. She is not a weak woman – she has _never_ been weak – and they might have died on this island with things unsaid between them, things that demand saying.

She's waiting when Flint and Charles circle around, and Silver steps forward to address the men, but Eleanor speaks first.

"A word, Captain Vane." Her voice is cool and level, the air of command settling back into her bones with ease. Schooling her features into a calm mask is harder, but she knows better than to show her cards with an audience. There are things she needs to say – things he needs to say – but not here.

"A word?" The two captains both look up, startled by her demand, but it's Charles who answers her, his voice rough against her skin. He doesn't move toward her, only pivoting his shoulders slightly as he addresses her, sunlight glinting off the few spikes around his neck not soaked in blood. "What matters could we possibly have to discuss at this fucking moment?"

It's a warning in itself, and his sneering response isn't entirely unexpected. Eleanor knows that last night changed nothing as far as he's concerned, knew it then and knows it now – knows that despite last night's proof his desires for her have hardly faded, after everything, the last thing Charles wants is to admit to anyone, including himself, that they are far from finished. Were they alone, the simmering rage in his narrowed eyes would undoubtedly be unleashed on her in full force, but with Flint and Silver and Madi there to bear witness, never mind the crews, a mask of indifference is all she'll get from him, a livid warning flashing in his glare.

It's one thing to know this, but quite another to be confronted with his dismissal and barely-restrained anger. It doesn't matter that she's certain things between them are far from settled, that his anger is in part at himself, that last night wasn't an ending – in that moment, her bravado fails, and the icy scorn of Charles Vane slashes through Eleanor as easily as if he'd run her through with his sword.

She can't help it when his name slips out in a quiet plea. It's barely a whisper of syllables over the rustle of the palms in the wind and the low murmur of voices surrounding them, the occasional scream of a wounded man being put out of his misery. There's more she ought to say, more that catches in her throat, but the cold fury of his eyes keeps her silent.

"Whatever it is can wait," he finally says, turning his rigid shoulders on her in dismissal. "Later, Eleanor."

"Charles–" This time, it's not the sentimental whisper she was too weak to contain, but a warning of her own, a shadow of her former self refusing to be dismissed.

But he isn't having it.

" _Later_." The edge in his voice is one rarely directed at her, and though it's meant to cow her, it has the exact opposite effect – Eleanor has never responded well to orders from Captain Vane. But she doesn't need to glance around to realize the notice they're attracting, and her pride begs her not to back down, but isn't her stubborn insistence on always being right the very thing that's landed her here? If she had just listened to Charles all those months ago when he had tried to tell her the British would never turn the island over to them, hadn't ignored that he had a talent for reading people and situations like few other men she's met, perhaps they wouldn't be where they are today.

But it still rankles to be told to wait in front of all the men, to bow to his order – there is no mistaking the tone of his voice – to wait until _he's_ ready to deal with her. It weakens her, but in a way, she supposes she owes him the courtesy of not challenging his authority in the battle's aftermath in the midst of the crews and captains.

It's late when he finally comes for her, a hard grasp on her elbow dragging her off the path on her way to the beach, her patience worn thin waiting for him, knowing after the day's battle and the longer war council she'd find him beside the waves. And for a moment, pressed tightly to him, Eleanor can close her eyes and pretend it's all been one terrible nightmare – that she made a different choice that night at the fort, tears stinging her eyes as she turned that key in a lock that was much more than bits of metal.

But when she opens her eyes, there is nothing soft or welcoming about the hard gaze of Charles Vane. "This way," is all he says, his eyes glinting in the moonlight as he tugs her down a barely-visible path. He's washed off the worst of the blood, but his scowl is no less savage.

They walk in silence, his grasp on her elbow never slacking, until they emerge on a rocky outcropping. He releases her then, taking a step back and folding his arms across his chest, his forearms corded with tension the only indication his indifference isn't quite what it seems. "Well?"

Standing there with him, the sea crashing below, she can't help but wonder if he's brought her here to make good on his promises and lead her to her death. The cliff they're on is high above the water, and by the roar of the waves, the rocks below are numerous. And maybe all that time on that ship and in that cell did break her, because she's so fucking tired of this that she almost welcomes the rocks over the argument they're about to have.

"You remember what I said in the fort," he finally begins, and to her surprise, her own weariness is reflected back in his voice. "I meant it. Fucking you last night doesn't change that."

"I know." Eleanor swallows hard, the echo of his words – _lock that gate and there is no walking back through it, ever_ – ringing in her ears _._ "It tore my heart apart to do it, but what you had planned, it wasn't–"

"What heart?" he interrupts, his lip curled in scorn. "You turned on me the first fucking chance you got–"

"I offered you a fucking future!" Eleanor snaps, advancing on him until they're nearly touching, the scent of sweat and salt-soaked leather strong. All this time and he can still get under her skin like no one else. "Do you remember me saying _that_?"

"Slavery by a different name." Though her voice rises above the crash of the waves, his remains low, little more than a growl on the wind. "I offered you a _real_ fucking future, and all the while you were plotting to steal the girl out from under me. You let me think you chose _me_ , for once, finally, that you chose _us_. Yet another fucking maneuver."

"You'd have done the exact same fucking thing were our positions reversed."

"No." The one word might as well be a knife in her belly, razor sharp and loaded with scorn. The memory of everything he's done to keep her safe hangs heavily between them in that moment – every time he's chosen her over his captain, his crew, his ship. Without saying a word, he's reminded her that for all she's called him an animal, for all that he's the fucking pirate captain, _she's_ the one who has turned her back on him over and over again; his narrowed eyes remind her that she has no business asking him a question like that when she bloody well knows the answer.

"What do you want, Eleanor?" he finally asks when she doesn't have a response for him. His voice loses its hard edge, his weariness once again showing through the cracks as his gaze drifts out over the open ocean.

"Why did you drag me to the edge of this cliff?" she counters, because if he's brought her here to shove her over the edge, she's not going down without having the truth from him – not in veiled actions or macabre letters, but in his own words.

"Because I don't trust you," he snaps, his hands rising to grasp her arms in an iron grip. "Because I have been warned about you, and I have seen the depths of your treachery. I've looked into your eyes knowing you'd chosen to leave me for dead, and yet still, here I am."

His words are filled with disgust and self-loathing, and she knows he isn't just talking about this moment on the cliff, but last night, and all the other nights he's spent in her arms. But the look he gives her is filled with such utter hatred that Eleanor spits out, "So you intend to finally make good on all your threats, is that it? One last fuck to settle your accounts before tossing them over the edge of this cliff?"

"I should."

"But you won't." It's a gamble, the certainty in her voice she doesn't quite believe, but his grip on her arms, bruising as it is, isn't entirely about anger or betrayal. And when he speaks, his eyes drift to her mouth, and lower still, and something familiar warms her blood.

"Not tonight," he says after a long pause, his grip on her arms unrelenting. His eyes flick to hers, pale blue in the starlight, and for one second, the mask drops, and he is bare before her. It's too intense to be anything but intentional, this glimpse he's giving her of his true feelings, and there is hate in his eyes, but there is something else, something tender and raw and deeply, deeply hurt.

It's the flicker of emotion she saw in him last night, and it's too much like looking into a mirror, so she kisses him, her fingers threading into his hair, still crusted with salt and blood and sand. Her other hand tight on the back of his neck, she yanks his mouth down to hers. His response is instant, his lips hard, his hands falling to her hips to jerk her closer in a grip so tight it just may bruise despite the layers of her skirts. She doesn't bother trying to stifle the groan that rises in her throat at the feel of him against her, the all too familiar hard lines of his body.

He backs her up against one of the palm trees, and she stretches her head back as his lips move down her throat, each breath chasing the next as she struggles to breathe – until the cool sting of steel touches her heated cheek.

Charles is every inch Captain Vane when her eyes snap open, his expression black and his fingers tight on the hilt of the blade held to her face. "What are you after this time?" he asks eventually when she doesn't speak or make a move to push him away despite the knife, his eyes never leaving hers. His lips are swollen, kiss-bitten and dark against his tanned skin in the pale light reflecting off the water below. The words are raw, despite his iron tone.

Eleanor steadies herself with a trace of her old resolve, struggling to check her natural instinct to lash out, to fight him for control of the situation. But it has less to do with the knife he's holding on her than it does her almost desperate need to have him look at her like he used to – as though she alone could give him what no man, no ship, no prize could – instead of the raging suspicion and mistrust she sees now.

She doesn't know why it's suddenly so important to her – for fuck's sake, she used to _hate_ when he looked at her like that, knowing the emotion behind it, knowing unless she was very, very careful he would catch her looking at him the same way. And maybe it's the months she spent away from him, or maybe it's having been with Rogers, deception or not, but fuck the consequences, she is determined to have that look again.

So she plays the hand she's been dealt.

"You also told me once if I chose you, I wouldn't have to beg them to let me keep what is already mine," Eleanor says quietly, her eyes dropping to the tarnished silver tabs around his neck, the thin leather cord of the longer pendant where it hangs in the air between them – anywhere but his eyes.

"And you fucking turned on me anyway," he all but snarls, his free hand gripping her jaw hard to force her to look at him. "Fuck, Eleanor. What is it you want from me? I know you didn't participate in liberating me from the fort out of fucking sentiment. There's always an agenda with you."

"I want what's mine." Eleanor isn't entirely certain he won't stab her where she stands when she touches him, but her palm lands on his chest anyway, his breaths short despite the stillness of his body. " _You_ are mine." The words come out far more certain than she is, a shadow of her old self schooling her voice and her features into a mask of self-assurance she does not feel. There was a time where claiming Charles as her own would have been as obvious as the sun rising in the east, but they're a long way from his tent on Nassau's beach.

"Is that what you think?" He glances down, almost lazy in his perusal of her, but he doesn't lower the dagger. "I told you I won't be shackled again, not even for you."

"I'm yours as much as you're mine," she tells him, swallowing her pride and the fear that has always come with admitting it to herself, never mind to him. She knows deep down it's true – and it's been true for a very long time.

He laughs at that, a raw, guttural laugh, but his palm rises to cup her jaw anyway, rough calluses from all the years of fighting familiar against her skin. "For how long, Eleanor? How long until I wake up with a fucking knife in my back?"

"At the moment, you're the one with the fucking knife in his hand."

Charles doesn't say anything, doesn't move, just watches her, his eyes narrowed and the sharpness of his cheekbones and tied back hair lending him a sinister air. And when he abruptly steps back, the knife hastily shoved into his belt, she almost thinks he's going to kiss her again.

"Any claim you might have laid on me was forfeit the moment you turned that lock," he finally says, his glance faltering for a split second, the hard resolve slipping to reveal a need burning hotter than ever. Yet he shutters it in an instant, the hard edge sliding back into place as he turns back toward the path with rigid shoulders. "I've saved your life, and you've saved mine. The account is settled."

"Charles, you–"

"You're right, you know," he cuts in, glancing back over his shoulder and leveling a cool look at her. "All that you've done demands an answer, and yet I can't bring myself to slit your throat and be done with it. I make no such promises of the men. Stay the fuck away from me, Eleanor."

It's only after he's left that she realizes it isn't blood from his knife dripping down her cheek.

-x-

The sound of steel clashing on steel draws her attention, but when Eleanor sees Charles sparring with one of the island men, a lesson clearly at work, she knows she should turn away.

And yet, she can't.

Both men are stripped to the waist, the late-afternoon sun casting a warm glow on their skin only highlighting the glisten of sweat. It's hot, the air damp and humid. Eleanor's own shirt clings to her back, and she's been sitting with Madi, learning as much as she can about the island and sharing stories of the girl's father. It was awkward enough at first, the realization that Mr. Scott must not have ever really trusted Eleanor enough to reveal his family's safety, but the two women have found common ground in their shared love of the man. Beset by enemies on all sides as she is, Eleanor appreciates a friendly face.

Charles has been anything but friendly, his icy silence since their exchange two nights ago not entirely unexpected, but no easier to bide. She misses him, misses when their arguments could be solved by fucking the anger out of each other – but all that they've done is not that easily forgiven. Eleanor still can't decide a lot of the time if she wants to scream at Charles or kiss him, and by the few glances she's caught directed at her, he can't make up his mind, either.

Anne's blatant disgust and hatred is much easier to read. Despite Charles' orders, a part of Eleanor still wonders when she's going to turn a corner to find Anne waiting with one of her knives.

The other man is in the dirt when Eleanor focuses on the sparring match again, Charles standing over him with his sword held to the former slave's throat. He waits a beat, but then he grins, the sword moved out of the way and his hand extended.

Within minutes, they're back at it, their quick steps kicking up dust. Charles has his back to her, and she can't help but trace his scars, the urge to reach out and touch him stronger than ever – but if he lets her near him again, it wouldn't be like her memories; he wouldn't abide her stroking her fingertips over the pale lines, sprawled on his stomach and content, a low rumble of pleasure in his throat at her touch. There was nothing tender about their coupling the night before the battle, and there's a part of her that wonders if that part of them is too damaged to ever be put back together.

With a sigh, Eleanor turns around to force herself away. The last thing she needs is a public display between her and Charles. No one needs to see her watching him so intently, either.

But Jack follows her, and once they've turned down enough paths to be relatively secluded, she turns to face him. "What?" she snaps, hands automatically going to her hips in exasperation. Whatever Jack has to say, she'd really rather he just come out with it.

"What the fuck are you doing, Eleanor?" he asks, glancing at her defiant posture and all but rolling his eyes at her, scorn lacing every word.

"Going back to–"

"Is that how it's to be? All right, then. What the fuck are you doing _with Charles_?"

"None of your fucking business."

"That's where you're wrong," Jack counters, and Eleanor has grown so used to his flair for the dramatic that, somewhere along the way, she forgot Jack is a pirate captain in his own right. The threat in his words is a stark reminder. "It _is_ my business. What you do, the choices you make, they affect him. More than you know, and more than he'll ever admit. And if you're too blind or stupid to see that, then–"

"Fuck you, Jack," she cuts in, fury flooding through her veins. How dare he follow her like this, to _lecture_ her about Charles, of all things, and to make accusations he has no right to make. She knows damn well what effect her decisions have on Charles, just as she knows the effect his decisions have on _her_. Eleanor knows more about the ripples of cause and fucking effect through the ties binding her and Charles than Jack ever will, whether she cares to or not.

She turns to go, but Jack's hand darts out, landing on her elbow and pulling her back. It's only the firm grip he has on her that keeps her from lashing out, her pulse pounding in her ears as her temper climbs higher and higher. "Take your fucking hands off me."

To her surprise, he releases her instantly, holding his hand up. "We can't all go on like this, Eleanor," he says when she doesn't immediately stalk off, shrugging almost helplessly. He isn't angry anymore, just tired – they're all so fucking tired. " _He_ can't. Not with what's coming. There's too much at stake for him to be wrapped up in your shit."

"He isn't–"

"He is," Jack says firmly, the look he gives her bordering on incredulous. "How you can't see it is beyond me." He shakes his head, sighing heavily. "I won't pretend to understand this thing between you. Personally, I think we'd all be best served if you had an unfortunate accident and were never seen or heard from again, but for some unfathomable reason, despite all you have put him through, despite the anger and the blood and the betrayal, all you've done to him and he to you, despite what I or anybody else might think of it, Charles disagrees. So I am asking you, for once in your life, to not be so goddamn selfish, and to think of him."

"I do think of him!" The words burst out of her without her permission, her hands shaking despite her effort to keep them controlled at her side. "I think of little else. Is that what you want me to say? That I made a mistake when I sent Hornigold after you? You think I don't know that? You think I haven't paid dearly for that choice?"

"I don't think you've paid nearly enough."

Struggling with her temper, Eleanor manages to regain some of her composure, her voice icy when she addresses Jack again. "You have no idea what I've paid, the things I have sacrificed."

"Maybe not, but I know what he's given up for you."

Jack's words are so unexpectedly soft that the fight goes out of Eleanor without warning, leaving her legs weak and her throat tight. "So do I," she manages to get out, holding Jack's eye long enough to be sure he understands that she means it. Why it's so important to her that he know this truth, she can't say – it's never mattered to her before what anyone but Charles thought of her feelings for him.

It's only after Jack nods, a faint acknowledgement, but an acknowledgement, that Eleanor turns and walks away.


	8. Chapter 8

In the end, Eleanor can no sooner avoid Charles forever than he can avoid her.

No one is foolish enough to believe winning one skirmish on an island no one knew existed until quite recently will hand them back Nassau. They will need to plot their course carefully if they're to have a prayer of taking back their world, and whether the crews like it or not, Eleanor has information.

She is no longer their tyrant or their queen. She is just a woman, but if they expect her to be cowed, she will prove each and every one of them wrong. Woodes Rogers tried to make her small in a cell in London – if she could maintain some semblance of her dignity and defiance then, she can do it now. Let them have their crude comments and rude remarks. After the indignities of the trial, there isn't much they can do to her.

And it's that realization that draws her closer than ever to Charles, because that is the moment she understands – there is nothing anyone, not even she, can do to him that is worse than his slavery. Nothing. No matter what is set before him, he has survived worse – and he would rather die than go back to his bonds. He told her that, once. She hadn't really understood at the time. Not as she does now.

Unbidden, the image of him so long ago flashes before her, his back bare before her and her lips unknowingly pressing where his scars cross. Something of it must show on her face, her talents at concealing her thoughts not quite what they were, and she catches Charles watching her from his position leaned against the opposite wall, his own expression unreadable, arms crossed. The pose is a familiar one, braces gleaming on his tense forearms, the thin fabric of his shirt clinging to his skin in the sultry night, his scarred brow lifted ever so slightly in almost perpetual contempt.

Sometimes she wishes they could go back – before he was captain, before she was the queen of thieves. Back to the days when he would come to her as quartermaster on behalf of his crew, and they would conclude their business before finding each other again in his tent or her bed or a dark hallway in the tavern.

Back to when she didn't know any better, when her affections came easier and his scars only made her love him more – when they stood as a representation of all he survived instead of a symbol of the walls between them.

Back to that first night when he stood between her and the rain, her body still tingling with the newness of him and what they'd done together, too young and naive to really understand what was happening – too arrogant to even consider that while she was plotting to use him, while she was doing everything in her power to bring him under her spell, he was quietly entwining himself in the deepest parts of her.

Except, despite all the times he's told her otherwise, he's never done it for any reason other than the simple fact of wanting her – wanting her not in spite of her hunger for power and her refusal to back down from a fight, but because of it. Shielding her, but always with an indulgent smirk so she would think he did it simply to irritate her, not because she actually needed his protection.

But she did. She needed him to keep her safe from the Ned Lowes of the world. And he had, without question, without complaint.

And she'd left him standing on the other side of a locked gate in the belly of the fort anyway, not with shock or disbelief on his face, but with raw resignation and quiet disappointment. It was the most vulnerable she's ever seen him, and she'd hesitated, thought about it, _really_ thought about opening the gate and handing the girl back – but in the end, she hadn't gone to the fort for him.

She'd gone for Nassau, and it wasn't Nassau staring back at her with pale blue eyes awash with betrayal – or was it?

"No." Charles holds her stare for one long moment before turning away from her, and she realizes she's completely lost track of the conversation – but he hasn't. His attention now fixed on Silver, he repeats the single word with a firm shake of his head.

"Why the fuck not?" Silver protests, his eyes sliding over her without any effort to conceal his loathing. He hates her – they all hate her, and they hate each other. Billy hates Flint, Charles hates Flint, Anne hates fucking everyone but Jack and possibly Charles, and the rival crews hate each other on principle. The camps roil and seethe with hate, and yet, here they all are.

"Rogers knows that she is the reason his men died on this island," Charles replies evenly, and Eleanor realizes with quiet horror they've been talking about _her_ and she's been too wrapped up in her thoughts of him to even notice.

"Not seeing the issue." Across the fire, Anne's narrowed eyes flash with all the venom of a coiled snake in the shadows. "Seems to me we'd be solving two fucking problems with one cunt."

"She's of more use to us alive." Charles glances around the fire, eyes narrowed at each of the men, though he lingers on Teach's heavy stare just a beat longer than the rest. Slowly, the tension dissipates from the group, their respect for Captain Vane outweighing their likely disgust with his decision to protect her.

They've all seen what happens to men who cross Eleanor Guthrie in defiance of Vane.

"It's late," Flint adds, gesturing to the dark, empty night. "Post a watch. We'll take this up again in the morning. Rash decisions will not win us back the beach, never mind the bloody fort."

She knows she shouldn't, but when Vane turns his back on the group, Eleanor follows him out into the night, the glowing ember of his cigar easy to pick out against the inky darkness. He must know she's there, but he ignores her, meandering past the tents and down to the surf, his boots stopping just shy of the waterline as he stares out at the endless black horizon.

"Have you got a fucking death wish?" The question is a drawl, the lazy indolence he's always reserved for her alive and well.

"I think we've well established you aren't going to kill me," she says tiredly, clasping her arms around herself as a breeze rises off the water, surprisingly chilly despite the warm night.

"I'll let Anne do it. Or maybe Teach. He owes you a knife between the ribs nearly as much as I do." Charles doesn't look at her, his eyes fixed on the distant horizon where lightning flickers, too far away to rattle the heavens – but thunder echoes in his voice all the same.

"I think you've just proven you won't do that either." The echo of Anne and Jack's overheard conversation floats through her thoughts – Charles has already flat out forbidden anyone touching her – but she doesn't point that out.

He grunts a response, his lips closing around the cigar. The flaring ember paints him momentarily in a wash of red, as though he's not so much a man as a demon risen out of the dead of night, but Eleanor knows better – knows that despite all of his hard angles and sharp lines, there are soft spots yet.

When he doesn't ask her why she's there, Eleanor doesn't offer an explanation. The truth is she doesn't know why she's followed him, other than a fierce craving for his presence and a desperate need for some measure of solitude. Standing beside him with the slow wash of the surf on the sand and the smoke from his cigar swirling around them, the mist of the ocean on her face, she finds a moment of peace in the midst of so much chaos.

Charles always has been her port in a storm, after all.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?" she asks, the quiet making her brave. What has she got to lose in asking? It's a question that's been bothering her since it occurred to her in the long hours of silence aboard the ship bound for London, and maybe now, after everything, he'll answer her truthfully.

"Tell you what?" he asks with barely-concealed impatience.

"That you loved me."

He lowers the cigar to his side, releasing a mouthful of smoke into the night where it meanders out over the water. Silence stretches between them, Charles utterly still beside her, and Eleanor begins to think he won't answer.

"I told you," he says eventually, the words rasping beyond his lips as though they're half stuck in his throat. His eyes flick toward her before resolutely returning to the horizon and the dancing light of the storm at the end of the world.

"After. You told me after," she presses when he says nothing more.

"Just because I didn't say the fucking words doesn't mean I didn't tell you, Eleanor." He brings the cigar to his lips, a measure of tension leaving his shoulders as though finally admitting it has eased something within him. "Not my problem you weren't fucking listening."

"You should have _told_ me," she insists, her pride and irritation with him mingling into a defiant snarl. "Not in some nonsense riddle, but the actual fucking words." Eleanor ignores that she hasn't said them, either – not to Charles, anyway.

Not to the only man for whom it's ever been true.

"Would it have made any difference?" The question is asked of the ocean, his gaze still firmly fixed on the waves. His voice is carefully devoid of emotion now, but Eleanor knows him too well – he's rarely tried to hide his emotions from her when they're alone, with one exception: when she's hurt him. "Can you tell me that if I'd said it, you would have made a different choice and not left me to answer to the men for your treachery?"

She doesn't have to ask to know what he means – of all the things they've done to each other, her choice to turn the key in the lock in the fort's tunnels is the open, festering wound. _That_ was the night it all started to come undone, when she lit a fuse with a terrible charge waiting at the end. "I don't know," she whispers, shrugging and swallowing hard against the sudden sting of tears. Christ, when did she get so fucking soft?

He doesn't respond immediately, every lithe muscle still beside her but for the occasional movement of his arm to lift his cigar, his shirt rustling. The sounds of the camp behind them are nothing more than a low hum of voices nearly drowned out by the wind and ocean, and she knows there are eyes on them, but it's the closest to alone they're going to get without him dragging her to the edge of a cliff again.

The last thing she expects is the sudden jerk of his arm, the cigar sailing out over the ocean as he turns to her. His mouth is on hers before she realizes what's happening, his palms rough against her jaw, and she leans into him without thought, her body fitting against his like the puzzle pieces they have always been. He tastes of liquor and smoke and salt, and it's so heartbreakingly familiar she can't help but wonder if he's toying with her as revenge for bringing up their past – for making him feel something other than endless betrayal and hatred.

But then he breaks the kiss, his forehead leaning against hers for the briefest of moments. "I love you," he begins, his voice gravel on gravel, "and I fucking hate you for it."

"I know," she whispers back, her hands rising to grip his wrists, to hold him in the moment with her as long as she can. Hard leather meets her skin, the braces covering his lower forearms preventing her from touching him, and she can't help but wonder if that's why he's chosen to wear them tonight, knowing he would see her at the war council. That he feels the need to arm himself against her stings, but Eleanor forces herself to stay in the present. "I know you do."

He nods, almost as if to himself, and then he takes a step back, dropping his arms so suddenly she has no choice but to let go. "I'm on first watch." It's a dismissal as strong as any, but she can't bring herself to turn away.

"You aren't the only one who should have said it," she says, holding onto the thin thread of hope his words pulled free. "I loved you. I still do."

"I know." His expression doesn't change, and he doesn't reach for her, and he doesn't have to say the rest – that loving her, and her loving him, it doesn't really make a fucking difference when it comes down to it. She still betrayed him then, and what's to stop her now? Love didn't do it the first time. Why should it a second? And while there's hardly anything she can do on the island surrounded by the crews, they won't remain here forever.

There's nothing she can say to him to convince him otherwise, nothing that can erase their history, but she touches his shoulder anyway, her fingers pressing into the brand his shirt covers. He glances down as she does it, his jaw tight, and she can feel him tense beneath her touch. "Goodnight, Charles," she finally says, withdrawing her hand and turning for the tents.

He's still standing there when she looks back from the edge of the fire, a lone shadow against the pale sand. Lightning flickers once more in the distance, but this time, Eleanor hears the rumble of thunder rolling across the waves as she walks away.

-x-

Charles watches the storm roll across the water after sending Eleanor away, thoroughly disgusted with himself. He's supposed to be smarter than this – he's supposed to stay the fuck away from the woman who nearly got him killed on more than one occasion.

And what's he been doing instead? Fucking her the night before battle because he couldn't refuse her, couldn't refuse himself. Telling her he fucking loves her, after everything, on this strip of beach where he could have died because of her.

But it's not a lie. He does love her.

He hates her too.

It isn't entirely a surprise when Jack appears before long, one eye on the approaching lightning and another on Charles. He sighs as he comes to a stop, offering the bottle of rum he carries. "I suspected I'd find you here." A pause, followed by a nervous glance, and Charles has nearly resolved to walk away before Jack can begin what is sure to be an irritating conversation, but he's not fast enough. "She seemed upset."

Resigning himself to hearing whatever it is Jack feels the need to say, Charles grunts in reply, snatching the bottle and drinking deeply. Just because he isn't surprised Jack has sought him out doesn't mean he wants to fucking talk about it. He barely knows his own mind these days when it comes to that woman, never mind any explanation Jack may attempt to pull out of him.

And for a few precious minutes, Jack somehow understands that and keeps uncharacteristically silent. They watch the storm together, the sheets of rain visible in the flashes of lightning, though their stretch of beach remains dry.

"Eleanor Guthrie has nearly cost us all our lives on several occasions," Jack finally says, taking a gulp of liquor before he continues, almost as if he needs to fortify himself for whatever comes next. "But if there is something to be learned in recent events, it's that there's little the ones we love can do to truly sever that bond. I'd forgive Anne anything." He laughs, a short, bitter noise. "Anne has also never actively tried to see me dead, but I suppose it wouldn't matter if she did. The things I've done for that woman, and I'd do them all over again."

"Do you have a fucking point?"

"I should think it obvious."

It is, really, but Charles hates these conversations, hates when Jack manages to reveal so many of his secrets with a few minutes of rambling. The man has always been clever, and it's served them well over the years, but it's irritating when Jack decides to apply those observation skills to Charles' personal affairs.

"My point, Charles, is that while I firmly believed Anne would do everything in her power to see me retrieved from that carriage with Rogers, there was a moment I believed I might never see her again. It does something to a man, a thought like that, and when it turned out I was wrong, all rational thought left my mind. What I'm saying is that despite everything you and she have done to each other, you've come out the other side of it. Personally, I can't say it brings me any pleasure to have her near you once more, but your feelings for her are plain. As are hers for you. If after all you've done to each other you still feel this way, what good does pretending otherwise do any of us?"

Jack's question is quiet, exhaustion in his words, and it's the honesty of the question that keeps Charles from losing his temper on his oldest friend – and Jack isn't entirely wrong. There's a reason he can't keep Eleanor at arm's length at all times; there's a reason he took her to bed despite still being of half a mind to slit her throat, a reason he kissed her on this very beach and spoke words aloud he's never said to another human being.

The fact that he doesn't like the reason – the fact that he despises the weakness in himself that is the reason – doesn't make it any less true.

"I do believe the experience in London changed her," Jack says eventually, when Charles offers no response to his question. "Not entirely – a tiger doesn't change its stripes and all that – but when it came down to it, she chose you over self-interest. I saw it, Charles. She had Rogers marching along to her tune . She could have left you in that cell to swing and gone back to her life as a reformed lady. She didn't."

"This time," Charles snaps, his patience with Jack's dissection of his relationship, such as it is, with Eleanor growing thin. "What of all the other times?" It's a question he's been asking himself a lot lately, as the pull of her grows and grows. The honest truth is he _wants_ to forgive her, wants to attempt to regain some semblance of what they once were, to reach out and grasp this future they've both flung about so many times, but every time he considers it, he wonders how stupid he could possibly be to accept her at her word.

"That's for you and her to sort out between yourselves, I suppose." Jack sighs, his hand falling on Charles' shoulder and staying there despite the narrowed glance directed his way. "You thought her dead once. Say whatever you like, but I was there. I saw what it did to you despite all of your efforts to assure the world you were pleased she met the end of a rope. I was beside you when you discovered her alive. After all the shit we have been through, and all the times we shouldn't have survived, do you truly wish to meet your maker with things as they are? For however long we get, ought we not to have the things we desire most? Isn't that the point of all this?"

"Fuck you, Jack." Charles doesn't want to have this conversation, doesn't want to hear Jack rationalizing the fierce cravings and sharp needs that have only grown with each passing day. His eyes once again drift toward the storm off shore, too conflicted to look Jack in the eye with any hope of keeping his thoughts off his face. The bursts of lightning have been fewer and fewer, the storm losing steam before it reaches their bit of beach. He almost wishes it would come, that the waves would roil and the wind would tear through the palms – that the weather would oblige the turmoil inside him by manifesting itself on the island.

Jack's hand drops from his shoulder, and with a muttered goodnight, his friend slips away, back to the tents – back to Anne. Charles called her Jack's dog once, his pride wounded and his temper provoked, but the truth is he's always respected the thing between them. They're loyal to each other to a fault in many ways, even when they've given each other every reason to turn traitor.

For years, he's wished Eleanor would display half that loyalty, that all that's passed between them would provide for some level of mutual respect. It's true she's always been the one to throw the first punch – literally, in one particular instance – but he's retaliated without regard for how deeply his blows might land, relished in it even. There's a viciousness to their relationship that Jack and Anne have never had with each other, and maybe it's another reason he should separate himself from her, but the truth of the matter is that it's part of what he loves about her.

Eleanor will never make herself lesser in his eyes – and he would never want her to.

Charles remains on the beach long after his watch has ended and the storm has died out. He already knows the choice he's going to make, already knows he's as powerless against his own desires as the sands against the waves, but he'll be damned if he's going to give into it that easily.

-x-

Charles has never been afraid of hard work; on the contrary, there is something infinitely satisfying about pushing his body to the limits of its endurance, until he can feel each muscle move beneath his skin and sweat drip from every inch of him.

The work is good for the men, too, exhausting them and occupying them while helping to repair the settlement. With so many people crammed in such tight quarters, it's a damned lucky thing that the crews haven't torn each other to pieces yet, and Charles intends to see that it remains so. He still hates Flint – hates him and his aristocratic bearing that no amount of pirating will ever erase – but they need each other now more than ever. Charles is content to be left out of whatever idiocy Silver and Flint have engaged themselves in, even if it does mean allowing them to make the decisions regarding the cache. That cache is worth a lot, but Charles sees the writing on the wall – that cache is going to end up killing all of them if they're not careful.

It's late afternoon by the time he heads down a less-traveled path, intending to throw himself into the sea's cool embrace before resuming the evening's debates on their plans. No one follows him, not even Jack, and it's a relief to be alone as the jungle swallows him up.

No matter how much he wishes it would, the one thing hard work can't take away is his mind's singular ability to relentlessly focus on Eleanor fucking Guthrie.

They haven't spoken since their conversation two nights ago, and though he can feel her eyes on him anytime they're near each other, she hasn't tried to approach him again. Jack is little better these days, his pointed looks and unhelpful advice wearing thin – and always accompanied by Anne's persistent suggestions of murder.

The jungle path ends abruptly, spilling out onto creamy sands after a final bend. His hands are already working at his belt, intending to leave his clothes in a heap before diving beneath the waves, but a glance down the beach reveals a familiar blonde figure huddled into herself, knees drawn up to her chest. It's a very rare day when the word _fragile_ can be used to describe Eleanor Guthrie, but it's all he can think when he sees her.

Charles debates leaving – they're alone, and Eleanor is the last person he should be alone with – but she turns her head as if she can sense him, and he knows the second she recognizes him. She gets to her feet as he walks across the sand, and he again thinks about leaving, but Charles refuses to flee as though he's afraid of a fucking woman, despite her stiff shoulders and rigid back.

It's only once he's within feet of her that he notices her red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks. She's doing her best to hide it, her teeth clenched and her expression hard, but there's very little she's ever been capable of keeping from him.

"Did you need something?" she asks as he approaches, her voice raw. Frustration flickers across her face, and she tries again, this time a little smoother. "Is Madi looking for me?"

"I didn't know you were here."

"Oh." She shifts her weight restlessly, glancing out over the turquoise water rather than looking at him. "I'll go."

"Eleanor." He catches her elbow as she begins to move past him, stopping her progress with a light tug. He _should_ just let her go, and he shouldn't give a shit that she's been crying, but he's seen this woman cry less than a handful of times in the decade he's known her. "I came for the water," he says quietly, nodding toward the sea.

He almost asks her to join him, almost says to hell with it, but despite his desire for her, his unease hasn't left. He's trusted her too many times, nearly all of them against his better judgement, and to do it once more is the height of stupidity. He may not be able to stop himself from loving her, but he doesn't have to be a fucking idiot about it.

So he turns away before she can respond, facing the water and beginning to methodically strip off his clothes.

"What are you doing?" she asks instantly, a slight tremble in her voice, and when he glances back over his shoulder, color has come back into her cheeks, her eyes suddenly bright.

"Swimming," is the only answer he gives, pushing his pants off his hips and leaving them in the sand before walking down to the water. It's too warm to be truly refreshing, but it feels good to dive below the waves and block out the world for a few moments at a time. With his eyes closed, it's easy to picture the look on her face when confronted with his nudity – half the frustration and irritation that has always put a fire in her eyes, and half filled with a lust for him she's never been able to disguise.

A part of Charles hopes Eleanor will join him, and a part of him hopes she'll be gone when he comes back to the beach.

She does neither, and he finds her sitting where he left her. She glances up as he emerges, her eyes tracking over his dripping limbs, desire clear on her face, but she doesn't do anything about it even as he stands in front of her, using his shirt to dry the worst of the sea from his limbs before pulling on his pants. He takes his time doing it, but even that doesn't draw a hint of a smile from her.

"When I was six, my parents fought terribly," she says out of the blue, her voice far away, lost in the memory. "My mother was so angry. She told my father Nassau was no place to raise a little girl." Eleanor glances up at Charles then, and all the pain she's been trying so desperately to hide since he found her on this beach stares back at him. "Maybe she was right. Maybe if she'd had her way, taken me back to London, it would have been better for everyone."

He drops to the sand beside her, not close enough to touch, but near enough that he can smell the faint scent of her skin on the air. "Not for you," he says eventually, leaning back on his elbows with his legs sprawled in the warm sand, the last of the sun's rays spilling across the beach and setting the sky on fire in a melody of reds and oranges.

"Maybe. Maybe if I'd been brought up to behave as a lady, I wouldn't have known any better."

Her bitterness stirs up a white hot flash of anger, and not for the first or last time, Charles wishes he could kill her father all over again. "Fuck that. You were never meant for that sort of life, and you know it."

"I thought I was meant for this life, but–"

"You are meant for whatever the fuck you want to be meant for, Eleanor," he interrupts, and from anyone else, perhaps it could be a tender statement, but he's Charles Vane and his voice is hard. Besides, he knows Eleanor – pity is the last thing she wants or needs. "Since when do you give a shit what other people think?"

"I don't," she insists, but there's something brittle in her voice, and god fucking help him, if she starts crying again he doesn't know what he's going to do. "I just...I thought I was helping. I thought I was keeping Nassau safe, and bringing back order, and peace, and all I did was…" She gestures helplessly to the empty beach and the vast ocean, the water's color deepening as the sun slinks toward the horizon. "Nassau is burning, and I lit the fucking match, Charles." She hesitates, her eyes flicking to his before darting away. "I lit a lot of fucking matches."

Maybe it's because Eleanor in tears is a sight he cannot handle twice in one day; maybe it's because after everything they've done to each other, _this_ cannot be the thing that breaks her, but he leans toward her, pushing her hair out of her eyes until she looks at him. "What is happening in Nassau has been coming for a long fucking time. If it wasn't Rogers it would have been another bastard in a red coat. Your sins are many, but this one isn't on you."

Charles is content to ignore her other implication for the moment, but Eleanor isn't. "I nearly got you killed," she whispers, her eyes turning glassy. All of her regrets float along the surface, and for a split second they're back in the fort, and he's watching her hesitate with wild desperation in her eyes and a key in her hand.

He drops his hand. It's a reminder of all the reasons he shouldn't be sitting here comforting this woman, but he can't bring himself to leave, either. There's nothing to be said in response, not with the truth heavy between them, and Eleanor falls silent beside him.

They sit together in the sand, not touching, not speaking, watching the sun go down over the edge of the world. Gradually her breathing slows, the tension drops out of her shoulders, and Eleanor wraps her arms around her knees again, her chin resting on her legs. He can all but feel the exhaustion radiating off her, and he braces himself against it, braces himself against the nearly intolerable desire to pull her into his side.

In the end, it isn't so much a conscious decision as it is that one moment they're sitting a foot apart, and the next his arm is around her shoulders, and she's leaning against him, her hair soft on his skin. Charles closes his eyes to the beach, to the fucking sunset, to the way the light catches in her hair, and he forces himself to take one breath, then another.

But there's no one to see them, and staying away from her is more and more impossible with each passing day. Charles is a man who has prided himself on his ability to exert control over his emotions, over his body, for the vast majority of his life. He decided a long time ago that the worst monsters were those of his own making, and he would not be afraid – he decided that any weakness in him would be ruthlessly carved out. And he's managed to live his life by those rules, rules that have kept him alive when he should be dead three times over, but there's always been one exception.

He wants to kiss her. He wants to pull her into his lap, push her skirts up, and remember what it is to bury himself inside her. Letting her into his bed the night before the battle was a mistake – that was a reminder, too.

A reminder of all the things that were good between them, once. A reminder that before they went to war, they were unstoppable.

And really, there's nothing else to lose. They've betrayed each other in the worst ways, and yet here they are, alone on this beach, wrapped up in each other's worlds like they've been since she was thirteen.

Charles opens his eyes to a sky streaked purple, night falling on the island. Eleanor is so still in his arms he wonders at first if she's fallen asleep, but when he shifts his weight, she draws away. "It will be dark soon," she says, and her voice is rough again, but when he looks at her, she's shuttered her emotions. It's as though she too knows that the hourglass has run out on their momentary reprieve. Maybe they're finding their way back to each other, maybe they're not – but one small sliver of peace on a quiet strip of beach is not a truce.

So he nods, getting to his feet and slipping his shirt back on, busying himself with refastening the straps for his weapons and struggling not to notice Eleanor's shiver as the wind kicks up from the water. He turns abruptly for the path, irritated with himself, with her, with the whole fucking island.

He doesn't look back to see if she follows. The war isn't over.

* * *

 **One more chapter to go!**


	9. Chapter 9

It's barely dawn when Charles jerks awake, the knowledge of someone in his tent tensing every muscle in his body before his eyes are even fully open. His hand curls around his pistol by instinct, and he's nearly got his finger to the trigger when it registers that Teach is laughing at him.

"If you aren't going to shoot me, keep an old captain company on a morning stroll." His bushy eyebrows raise with the same infuriating amusement that Charles recalls from years of conversation with the man, and his once-captain gestures around the small tent, empty beyond the heap of clothes and weapons. "Unless you've something better to do?"

Cursing under his breath, Charles glares at the man's broad back as he exits the tent, relaxing his grip on the pistol and scrubbing his palm over his face. He'd dreamt of Eleanor aboard the _Ranger_ on a night so long ago it feels more dream than memory even as he thinks of it now, but instead of the evening ending in the captain's cabin, he'd stood by and watched as Flint ran her through. Ran her through and then kicked her overboard, the last image he remembers before jerking awake her eyes wide in horror as she tipped back over the rail.

Fucking Jack. All that talk of Eleanor dead has stirred up old ghosts and fears, and Charles doesn't have fucking time for this. It's hard enough to stay away from her without the unnecessarily vivid image of her death running through his mind, at Flint's hand no less – even if Flint _is_ going to get them all fucking killed.

It isn't hard to connect the dots that the more Flint and Silver bicker, the more this whole fucking thing is coming unraveled. Were it just him in this, were Eleanor truly dead, Charles might be of half a mind to take Jack and Anne, and get the fuck off this island before the whole goddamn Navy shows up with a Spanish armada in tow.

But Eleanor will never give up Nassau, and fool that he is, he won't give up Eleanor, so here they are.

Teach is waiting when Charles finally exits the tent, tightening the buckle for his sword belt as he emerges. The sun has only just crested the horizon, still more red than orange, and the western sky remains a dark, inky blue. It's toward that darkness that Teach sets off, the camp only beginning to stir as they make their way across the sand.

"I made you an offer, before all of this," Teach says without preamble halfway down the beach, his arms clasped behind his back as he continues to walk alongside Charles'. "To leave Nassau behind and assume your place at my side."

Charles says nothing, his grip on his sword tightening at the memory of that particular offer. Teach hadn't so much _offered_ as shown up in Nassau and pointed out everything Jack and Charles were trying to do was a waste of time and energy. Charles hadn't wanted to know it in that moment, had insisted he was _committed_ to his cause, but he'd known before fucking Hornigold and his shit pardons showed up on the beach. Nassau wasn't the place it had been – the men weren't what they had been.

There was a time when not a single man on the island would give a fuck what the English were offering for a pirate's head – turning on a captain in that manner would be unheard of. And yet there he'd been, prepared to give his life for the place, prepared to defend it, and they'd turned on him in an instant.

Teach saw it before he did, _told_ him he was willing to sacrifice his life for men who wouldn't do the same. He'd been right then, and walking along in the early dawn light, Charles can't help but wonder what unpleasant truth Teach has to share now.

"What is the end you seek here, Charles?" Teach asks eventually, not pausing is his even steps, slow and measured as they are.

"You've been there every night, same as I have."

"Yes, I've watched you argue with Flint, and I've watched him continue to do exactly as he damn well pleases. The only one he even makes an effort to listen to is Silver, and every other word out of that man's mouth is a lie. They don't care about your opinion. They never have. Flint only gives a shit about Flint."

Charles stops, the camps barely visible in the corner of his vision. They've walked far enough to not be overheard, but his voice is still low when he says, "You want something." He doesn't have the patience for this conversation, not now, not ever. He'll tolerate a lot from Teach, out of loyalty, out of respect, out of appreciation for everything the man did for him, but there is a limit to what he'll endure.

"What I've always wanted – to see you assume your rightful place. To leave behind this fight which is beneath you, to achieve the freedom you've so sorely wanted your entire life." Teach pauses, his eyes steady and hard, evaluating, and Charles knows whatever he says next will be the thing he's meant to say all along. "To rid yourself of Eleanor Guthrie once and for all."

And there it is.

Charles laughs, no real amusement in it. All these years and here they are again, Teach on one side and Eleanor on the other. He's chosen her every time, and this is where it's landed him. No ship. No crew. An escaped slave in a bedraggled army of escaped slaves, the demons of his past haunting him at every turn.

And Eleanor fucking Guthrie consuming his every waking thought.

"You stay here, Charles, and Flint will lead you to your death. I've never liked the man. Do you know why that is?" Teach doesn't so much as pause for Charles' answer, continuing on in the same even tone, as though they're discussing trade routes. "Flint is blinded by his history, by some noble vision he has for that place. Flint isn't a person. He's a character, a mask settled over an Englishman who has never let his rage at Whitehall go. He doesn't want freedom. He wants to be right."

"Nassau–"

"Fuck Nassau. This isn't about Nassau. It's about a woman, same as it's always been. You told me once she taught you a lesson, an effective one. Have you forgotten?"

Charles grips his sword so tightly his knuckles ache. "I have forgotten nothing." He hasn't – he remembers each and every thing Eleanor Guthrie has done. He remembers that she put a bounty on his head, that when every other murdering, thieving piece of shit on that island was to be given a chance at a respectable life, she'd deemed him incapable of it, unworthy of it.

That he never would have taken the pardon isn't the point.

But he isn't innocent in all of this. Neither of them are – never have been. And the longer they spend on this island, the more it begins to feel like maybe, just maybe, there is a chance for them after all, that their accounts could truly be settled. Charles was born a slave, and Eleanor built an empire from practically nothing. They never should have amounted to anything, either of them, and yet she is notorious in London, and all the Caribbean fears his name.

They worked together, once, instead of against each other. What might come of it now, with so much learned in their failures?

"You claim that, and yet you're still here." There's disappointment in Teach's voice, a resigned sort of acceptance despite the bitter undertones.

"As are you."

Teach sighs, pivoting to face the ocean. "No longer. My ships leave on the evening tide. Nassau is lost. I'd rather you weren't lost with it, but you'll make your own choices, same as you always have." He offers one last glance at Charles from the corner of his eye and then turns back toward the camp without another word. He doesn't look back.

Charles stays at the edge of the beach, watches as the sun rises above the camp and daylight spreads out over the island. Teach isn't wrong about Nassau. The odds of success are limited, and even were they to succeed, what future could he find there among the men who turned traitor the moment someone offered them money for his head? What's the point of returning to a place that, despite his blood and sweat coating the streets, cares not at all what happens to him?

Money makes sheep of us all, indeed.

The glint of sunlight in Eleanor's hair catches his eye as she steps out onto the beach, and Charles watches her turn, slowly scanning the beach until she finds him. She doesn't move in his direction, her bearing once again proud and steady, all trace of the woman he found on the beach yesterday neatly put away, but she doesn't look away, either.

He doesn't regret choosing her all those years ago, despite everything that came after. Choosing Eleanor then was choosing himself – choosing her was stepping out from under Teach's shadow and making a life purely his own. For all of Eleanor's faults, for all of her manipulations, she knew exactly what to say to him to make him see her way of things – she knew that the thing he wanted most was to be under no man's orders save his own. And now with the choice before him once again, he understands more than ever why Jack didn't leave Nassau with him when Rogers first arrived.

Jack is the closest thing to a brother Charles has ever known, and despite that, despite their loyalty to each other, Jack has outgrown him. He's his own man, his own captain, and to go back to being under the command of another, even Charles, was unthinkable.

Charles understands this, because as little as he wishes to see the last of Teach, he can't go back, either. A part of him knew it before they even reached Ocracoke, as little as he wanted to admit the truth of it to himself. Things are different now. Charles is different now – and so is Eleanor.

Maybe Jack was right. Maybe the experience in London did change her. Maybe it was something else. But there is no denying that while much of her remains the same woman he fell in love with all those years ago, the part of her that would sacrifice anyone or anything to see her ends achieved is nowhere to be seen.

She did choose him, in the end, when it mattered the most.

Charles turns away, dropping to the sand and setting his eyes resolutely on the horizon. He's got to be the biggest fucking idiot in the Caribbean if he puts his trust in that woman again; if he lets her get close to him, she'll sink her claws in and tear him to shreds.

But when he thinks of the alternatives, there are no real options. Jack is right – he remembers all too well what it was to believe her dead. He'd lived for months with the belief that the last words they'd had for each other had been threats and betrayals, that she'd gone to her death knowing he'd vowed never to forgive her. It had been a comfort some nights, a petty, vengeful comfort while he seethed in the dark, while he hated her for allowing it to end this way – hated her for not believing that he could keep her safe, give her the future she so desperately wanted.

The trouble is, anger isn't the only thing that kept him company on those terrible nights. Deep into a bottle of rum, the lies he told himself to keep his demons at bay collapsed, and his failures became legion, Eleanor's rejection chief among them. Old insecurities were given new life, and he'd wanted, desperately, the ability to make things right with her.

Even standing on Teach's ship in the bay after his narrow escape from the fort, knowing what he knew in that moment, before the anger, before the betrayal, before the crushing disappointment in her decisions, Charles had been _relieved_ to find her alive. It didn't matter that she was at the fucking governor's side – she had _survived_. The English could dress her up however they liked, soften her, but the woman who slipped out of the hangman's noose could be none other than the Eleanor Guthrie who stood in the middle of the camps at thirteen with a smirk on her lips.

She's still there when he glances over his shoulder, looking much more like herself in the borrowed clothes. All that's missing is a set of keys on her hip, and she could be a spectre of the past come to life again – she could be a second chance.

"Fuck you, Jack," Charles mutters to himself, turning away from the beach, from the things Jack said to him, from Eleanor, from the decision he's already made but hasn't quite come to terms with.

-x-

Two beaches, two very different conversations, and his words haunt Eleanor for days. Charles' love and hate for her are entwined so thoroughly she has no idea which holds sway at any given moment, but if she hadn't made her peace with him, with herself, before he told her in no uncertain terms she belonged here, that would have been the final piece clicking into place.

It's also a sign that things are mending between them, however slowly. With a little bit of patience, she just might get that future he offered her once.

But Eleanor isn't a patient woman.

Her experiences in London should have taught her something of the art of patience, and her experience now, on this fucking island where she's all but useless, that should teach her something about patience, too.

But it doesn't.

So when the evening's war council retires, Eleanor waits for the men to disperse, some to the women who give themselves freely, some to their tents, others still to fires at the edge of the camps where dicing and drinking will go long into the night. Charles stalks away from the fire, headed down to the water alone, cigar in hand. Not even Jack follows him when his shoulders are as rigid as they are now.

Charles argued with Flint again, their disagreement over tactics spilling into a shouting match that left everyone on edge, though she's certain Teach's absence has more to do with it than anything. Losing the men and the ships blew a hole straight through Flint's latest scheme, and even Eleanor can see they don't have the men to engage Rogers in the sort of assault he's proposing.

Eleanor doesn't follow Charles. Rumor has it he argued with Teach this morning at dawn, and even if that isn't true, she knows the older captain never would have left the island without asking Charles to join him. That he's still here means he's chosen to stay. She isn't sure if it's for Nassau or for Jack – or for her.

But she is certain that they can't go on like this. It would be different if Charles didn't want her, but Eleanor can feel his eyes on her, and she knows all too well what it is to love and hate him all at once – and she knows which emotion wins, in the end. She knows that despite his cold dismissal when they first spoke, yesterday afternoon was the closest they've come to being at peace with one another in a long time.

She knows because she's on this fucking island because of him; she knows because when faced with his death, all of her ambitions and dreams seemed so fucking pointless without him.

So she waits for Charles to make his way back to his tent, the camp settling into nothing more than a low rumble of the few voices still awake. And then she waits a bit longer, knowing it will take him several gulps of rum and a fair bit of tossing about until he falls into a restless sleep. Half-asleep, he's less likely to have time to form a defense against her – he's more likely to be honest not only with her, but himself.

Charles is an incredibly light sleeper, always has been, and she knows it stems from the horrors of his childhood, an ingrained vigilance that has kept him alive all these years. But still, she forges forward with her plan, her steps light as she slinks down through the shadows and slips into his tent.

He pushes up onto his side the moment she enters, his hand beneath the rolled fur serving as his pillow, but he doesn't relax when he sees it's her. He also doesn't say a word, the slight lift of his brow the only indication he's waiting to see what she does next before he makes a decision.

Eleanor takes a slow breath, hoping he can't detect the tremble in her hands as she begins to undress without a word. If he can sense her unease, his expression doesn't so much as flicker from the same almost bored indulgence he's offered since his eyes met hers. It's only once her skirt has fallen to the ground, her shirt dropped on top of it, that he takes his eyes off hers, the slow sweep of his gaze over her body silent.

He doesn't encourage her further, but he doesn't send her away. He merely waits.

So Eleanor takes the few steps required to put her beside his pile of furs and blankets. She knows he's naked beneath the blanket draped low over his hips, knows that even if it wasn't for the oppressive heat, he hates sleeping in salt-crusted clothing. And it's not her nudity that makes her bare before him – he's seen her naked more times than she can fathom – but his silence slices her open in a way she never would have allowed in the past.

Things are different now.

Eleanor doesn't know that fucking will solve anything, but it's the one thing between them that has always been easy, and she needs for one goddamn thing to be easy right now. She also knows she wants him just as desperately as she did before it all went to hell, and Charles has never made a secret of wanting her, despite his threats and unpredictable moods. But Charles remains silent, rolling slightly back, his propped elbows keeping him from laying flat as he watches her settle her knees on either side of his hips, his scarred brow arching.

He doesn't ask what she's doing – it's pretty fucking obvious what she's doing – but he doesn't question her decision, either. Not that he makes it easy for her, leaned back and watching her with something like contempt. But once she leans down to kiss him, her breasts brushing against his hot skin, it's as if she's branded him by the way he jerks and grabs hold of her with a low curse.

Flipping her easily onto her back, he tugs the blanket out from between them, settling between her parted thighs and grabbing hold of her hands. Against the urgency and suddenness of his movement, the tenderness of his fingers weaving through hers is a surprise, but whatever emotion the action betrays, his kiss is all ruthless, vicious desire. It's teeth and tongue and possession, an echo of the night before the battle.

But it's more than that – it's the way he used to kiss her when returning from a month at sea, one part filthy, physical need, his body hard against hers, his mouth demanding, but his fingers grasp each of hers with an unspoken _I missed you_ that neither of them will say aloud.

Eleanor wants to say it now, wants to let the words fall out of her mouth and breathe them against his lips, but she's half-afraid speaking will ruin it, will somehow remind Charles of his vows of hatred and murder, despite how he's softened toward her over the last several days. So she keeps silent and hopes that he feels it as keenly as she does now that she isn't fighting it so fucking hard.

She can't help but wonder if this is what it's been like for him all these years, struggling to contain herself in the uncertainty of his reaction. The emotions he's alluded to so often had to have always been there, just below the surface and under his careful control. Or had it all been there in the open and she just hadn't wanted to see it?

Her name is raw in his throat, his voice scraping over her skin as he pulls her from her thoughts. His breaths are short, his chest rising and falling with the effort as his pale eyes settle on hers from where he kneels between her thighs. It's only when he has her attention that he tugs on the hand he still holds, his arms wrapping around her until she's perched above him. The heat of him bleeds into her skin, her pulse throbbing between her legs, and it's torture to feel him there, trapped between her thighs but not where she wants him.

His palm settles on the small of her back, fingers splayed to keep her steady as his other hand grasps her jaw, the touch gentle despite the air of command about him. "This is it," he says quietly, the words serious despite the desire darkening his eyes. "Were you anyone else...but know if you betray me again, I will carve out your heart before I let you have mine."

They've threatened each other so many times over the years, and she's rarely believed him, but this time she does. It's different, now, with so much on the line, so much declared openly. Eleanor nods, shifting her weight in his lap, her need for him verging on desperate – and she'd really rather not talk about this anymore. But his grip changes instantly, his hand moving to her hip, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.

"Eleanor." Every muscle in his body is tense against hers, the ridges of his abs and the curves of his shoulders all taut in the dim light filtering through the fabric of his tent. There's an earnestness to him, and it softens him despite his hard grip and tense body. "That life together, we can have it. We can be free. But I won't play games with you anymore. I won't be a pawn in your fucking schemes. Not yours. Not Flint's."

"I love you." In the end, after everything, it doesn't require thinking or worrying – it's when she stops doing both of those things, just for a moment, that the truth of it slips out, easy as breathing. "We're not people who say it, and I might never tell you again, but tonight, I'm saying it. I fucking love you. So I choose you. Your day, month, year, lifetime. Whatever we get, we get it together."

She's barely finished speaking before his hands shift, his fingers twisting in her hair, her loose braid nearly undone as he brings her mouth down to his, his grip on her hip slacking as they come together, not even kissing anymore, just breathing against each other's lips as she sinks down.

The last time they were together before Eleanor's London detour, he was king of the fort, a pirate lord commanding the bay. He'd been flush with the prize hidden away in the floors below, and she'd been full of fury and regret, clinging to him with the knowledge it would be the last time. He wouldn't forgive her, but it was a sacrifice she'd been willing to make.

How utterly fucking stupid of her.

The last time they were together in this place, it was a silent, sharp coupling – a thing born of fear and desperation, a parlay granted only with the specter of death hanging over them. She hadn't wanted to be alone, and while she'll never know exactly why Charles accepted her in his bed that night, she can't help but think it was in part because if he were to die in the morning, he didn't want it to be without being with her one last time.

Now they're on an island with a ragtag company of pirates and escaped slaves, little to their name beyond each other, and Eleanor thinks of all she ever sought to achieve – the power, the hunger for legitimacy – and she doesn't fucking _care_. Charles is right, always has been – freedom is what matters; power means nothing if it comes with an iron manacle around her soul. When it comes down to it, it isn't his power that attracted her that day on the beach when she was thirteen – it's his freedom. It's always _been_ freedom. Somewhere along the way, she lost track of that.

Now, when they move together, it isn't the frenzy and desperation it's been so many times before. It's something else, something that has her rocking her hips against his, their arms bound around each other even as the sultry night coats them in sweat. It's her fingertips running over his brand and scars, and his eyes on hers, his feelings for her unshuttered and unchecked every time he touches her, kisses her, until need overruns them, and he's driving into her hard, his breaths gasping with hers.

He kisses her hair when it's over and they've untangled themselves, Eleanor's cheek on his shoulder and her fingertip idly tracing over his glistening skin. She's exhausted, emotionally, physically, sated and content and overwhelmed, and she should just close her eyes and let sleep take her, but she wants to keep touching him, wants to feel the grit and sweat and skin and life of him beneath her fingers. And she imagines it isn't so different for him, his hand running over her hip and back and into her hair, toying with the snarled strands before tracing the whole path over again.

They are at peace. Their war is finally over.

And it's the complete wrong time to tell him, and he probably already knows, but of all the lies she's told, the night she told Woodes Rogers she wants her word to mean something again, well, that wasn't a lie. Ironic, considering she'd taken him to bed purely to earn his trust, but nonetheless true.

"I fucked him," she says quietly, barely breathing as Charles tenses beside her, the pressure of his fingers in her hair no longer quite so gentle. "Rogers."

"If you're looking to give me further incentive to remove the man by any fucking means necessary, you–"

"I'm telling you because all these years, we've both known you're the only man I've fucked." She smiles against his skin, stretching her neck to kiss his chest. She knows that despite her never having told him there was no man after him or in between, he's always known somehow – and he's always liked that he's the only one, despite Max. But it's not the case anymore, and though in that moment Eleanor is surprised to find she almost wishes it were, she continues, "I'm not apologizing for it. I did what was necessary, and you and I...but I'm also not letting you believe me something I'm not. Not anymore."

His sigh is the only warning she gets before he rolls her onto her back, balanced on his elbow above her as his free hand roams, gentle but with a possessive edge that's impossible to miss. "The night I went to end Ned Lowe, he accused me of being frightened of his feelings toward you, of what he might do. He wasn't wrong." His eyes flick to hers, his palm settling over her heart. "I'm the same man I've always been, Eleanor. I will protect you from pieces of shit like him whether you ask me to or not. You've taken many things from me, but none of those were things I ever feared losing."

Eleanor nods, her throat inexplicably tight as she finds his hand and twists her fingers through his, a flash of memory tearing through her – a night on a beach not so different from this, his rage at her inability to protect herself and his fierce determination to change that. This is what he meant, she realizes, when he said he'd told her he loved her – not in three often misused, cliched words, but in actions. And for a man like Charles, who has lived his whole life by his actions, she should have understood a lot fucking sooner how much more that actually meant.

How much it _means_.

"I wish you'd told me, then, about Max," she says softly, raising her fingers to graze his jaw. "That you were trying to smuggle her out. What really happened."

"I didn't know. Last I saw her, she was safe and on her way out of that fucking place." He leans into her touch, a lion momentarily tamed. "I saw your face, Eleanor. You wouldn't have listened to a fucking thing I said."

"She blamed me for what happened."

"She should have blamed her fucking self." Charles turns his head, pressing his lips to her palm. "Fuck everyone else. We'll do what needs to be done for Nassau, but make no mistake, if the choice is you or that bit of beach, I will choose you, and I will not apologize for it."

" _This place is just sand,_ " Eleanor whispers, a bitter laugh on her lips as the words Max hurled at her so long ago resurface. She sighs at the questioning look from Charles, his lips traveling slowly over her fingers in a lazy perusal of her skin. "Something Max said to me. When Silver stole that fucking page from Flint and she was...she wanted me to leave with her. She _begged_ me to leave with her."

Charles pauses, his lips hovering over the inside of her wrist as he glances down at her. There's an odd expression there, as though she's finally revealed a secret he's long wondered about. "What?" she asks when he doesn't speak, his stare unnerving in its intensity despite his soft touch.

He shrugs, his gaze dropping to her fingers as he winds them together with his. "She asked me how it felt when you threw me aside not two days after I knew you'd spent the night in her bed."

"She didn't understand," Eleanor says quietly, squeezing her fingers around his before glancing up at him. "I couldn't leave Nassau. Not then. For her to ask…"

Charles nods, and a tiny smile graces her lips as she stretches up to kiss him. Eleanor doesn't doubt Max loved her, but it wasn't the same. Charles has always loved Eleanor exactly as she is, never tried to change her – and even when he asked the impossible of her, asked her to give up the girl and choose him, the look on his face had told her he already knew the answer long before she turned the key in the lock. Even when he must have wanted nothing more than for her to come back through the gate, even _then_ he'd known her for who she was.

Who she is.

But it's different now. Everything that Nassau could have been, everything Eleanor spent her life working for...in the wake of all that's happened, the years that have gone by and the sacrifices she's made for _nothing_ – the place that Woodes Rogers occupies _is_ just sand. Everything that Nassau still is, everything it represents to her, none of that is a spot on a map.

Not for her. Not for Charles. She's all but certain not for Jack or Anne, and she already knows Teach doesn't give a shit about Nassau town – he's made that clear with his departure.

As though he's followed the direction of her thoughts, Charles says quietly, "Teach told me a story as we sailed away from Nassau." His eyes drift away from her, unfocused as he slips into the memory. "A stupid fucking story, really, but his point was that a woman leaves her mark. He wanted me to know he knew I was conflicted about leaving Nassau – about leaving you, having just discovered you were alive when I'd believed you dead."

"Were you?"

He ignores the question, squeezing her hand where their fingers are still tangled together. "He also said that a lion keeps no den." His eyes flick back to hers, an old intensity flaring to life. "I thought the same, at the time."

"And now?"

Charles' lips twist into a self-deprecating smirk right before brushing over her fingers as he lifts her hand to his mouth again. "At first, sailing again with him and the crew, I was glad to see the last of Nassau, to go back to a life where I knew where I stood, on a ship, on a beach. We took a prize, and it should have been a victory, but there was a Spanish sailor I spoke to before he died. The ship should have surrendered. Five ships in Teach's fleet to their one, but they fought to the last, not for themselves, but for their families back in Spain. And then on Ocracoke, Flint spoke of Rogers taking the island as taking our home. Asked me what kind of fucking man I was, and I didn't have an answer."

"So you decided to come back," Eleanor says quietly, fighting not to wince at the memory of everything that came after that.

"Teach was about to kill Flint. Nassau would have died with him. I wasn't ready to let that happen." His eyes meet hers, and she sees the rest of what he leaves unsaid in the fierce look he gives her. Letting Nassau die wouldn't have just been about Flint and the English – it would have been turning his back on Jack and Anne, and it would have been the final nail in the the coffin their future together rested in. So he'd turned his back on Teach – again.

He chose her when he had no reason to – again.

"I know." Her hand slips behind his neck, tugging him down until their lips are nearly touching. The weight of the conversation hangs heavy in the air, truths long unspoken tightening her lungs. "Nassau...I want it," she tells Charles, her eyes on his despite how close they are, how exposed it makes her feel to be having this conversation like this with him. "I want to run Rogers off the island, and I want our home back. But I won't sacrifice you for it. Not again."

Charles pulls back from her abruptly, his gaze turning sharp. After everything that's happened between them, Eleanor can't place his reaction, and she swallows hard against a swell of panic at his narrowed eyes. "What the fuck, Charles?"

He shakes his head slowly, his expression indecipherable. "You don't give a shit about that place any more than I do," he finally says. It isn't a question. "Not anymore."

"I just said–"

"What you want no longer exists there – it will never exist there again. England's island. Spain's gold. That was a mistake. It was too much to be ignored. What we did demanded an answer. You've told me yourself the Spanish gave Rogers a deadline he won't meet. There isn't going to _be_ a Nassau if they send those ships." Charles glances around the dark tent, his shoulders losing some of their tension. "That fucking cache on this island...Flint is going to bring the entire fucking Navy down on us. A man like Rogers won't give up so easily. His pride won't allow it. And these people, who've known peace for years until we showed up, who finally had an escape from their slavery, and now they're up against an enemy that will never stop coming. And for what?"

"You don't want to go back." Eleanor can't decide if she's relieved or disappointed. Some part of her – a tiny, deeply buried part of her – has been unwilling to admit she's considered never returning. But now, with a future she never thought possible within her grasp, she can't help but wonder if turning her back on the place for good is the way they finally move beyond all of it.

The look he gives her is weary, but it also reveals what she's already realizing. Charles doesn't want to go back – but he's willing to for her. For Jack. The things he's sacrificed for her, even now with these last few weeks tense as they've been, when he's tried to convince himself he hates her more than he loves her, he's stayed and fought for a place he doesn't give a shit about.

"What do you want, Charles?" Eleanor asks softly, reaching for his hand once more, tugging to bring him closer. "Fuck everyone else on this island. What do _you_ want?"

He leans back toward her, resting on his elbow as his fingertips brush her jaw. "Make no mistake, Eleanor. I am not Flint. There is no cottage with books and teacups in a future with me. There is an open ocean and each other." He hesitates, and if she didn't know him so well, she'd miss the flicker of doubt in his expression. "That's enough."

He doesn't ask if it's enough for her, and he never will. He's doing the same thing he's done since the first night she took him to her bed – he's stating a fact and leaving it to her to decide what she'd like to do with it.

"I know who you are, Charles." She stretches her neck up, brushing her mouth against his, her teeth catching his bottom lip before she lays back, allowing herself a satisfied smirk at the low rumble in his chest. "I craved legitimacy for so long. I destroyed so many things in its name."

He brings his palm to her cheek, his rough fingers delicate as they sweep across her brow. This time when he leans down to kiss her, need drives his mouth hard against hers. Their conversation has stirred up old ghosts, old hurts – behind the promise of something new, it's a reminder of everything they've done to each other, every time they've chosen power or position over one another.

And all that it's cost them.

It's a price Eleanor refuses to pay again, and by the way Charles' fingers wind into her hair, holding her in place as he settles his weight over her, his hips cradled between her thighs, he doesn't either.

"Fuck me again before the watch changes," she demands as he moves his lips along her jaw, the scruff of his beard dragging along sensitive skin. It's a relief to make such a demand again, a relief to have a sliver of their old ease slip between the sheets with them.

He picks his head up at her ragged request, and the grin he gives her is downright sinful. "Since when are you afraid someone may hear us?" he asks in a low rumble, but he's teasing her, and fuck, if she didn't know she could want him even more in this moment than she already does.

"Since you're liable to kill a man who interrupts us," she tosses back with a lift of her brow, a challenge and a dare, and _god_ , she missed this.

He laughs, a low, quiet noise that has him shaking against her as he bends to cover her mouth with his again. This kiss is tender, softer than nearly any other moment that has passed between them, and she returns it in kind, sighing against his lips as they languish in each other's arms, becoming pleasantly tangled as one kiss leads to another.

It's a surprise when he shifts onto his back, leaving her above him with a gleam in his eye as he palms her breast, rolling her nipple between his fingers with all the lazy indolence she remembers from many nights spent in his tent. "I remember the first night you came to me like this," he tells her, desire dripping from every word as his eyes darken. "How determined you were to be in control despite having no idea what you were doing."

"I figured it out," she snaps, her instinct to pull away impossible to ignore, but his other hand drops to her hip, anchoring her in place.

"You were fucking magnificent." He nudges her forward, his breath stuttering as she slides over his length, slick and ready for him, but drawing it out. "You refused to be afraid, determined to figure it out, determined to have exactly what you wanted." Eleanor moves on her own, savoring the friction and the way his throat bobs as he swallows, hard. She's always loved the way he looks at her in moments like these, wrestling with his fierce need for her and the desire to watch her above him. "And you wanted me."

Her answer is to reach between them, guiding him into her body and rolling her hips forward to take him deeper. His words cut off in a low groan, the hand on her hip falling to her thigh and gripping tightly, not to guide her, but almost as if he needs to ground himself to her. There's something new between them as she moves, her palms balancing on his shoulders. It could be the way he touches her, his fingers trailing over her cheek and through her hair, his other hand massaging her thigh as his hips tilt to meet hers – or it could be the raw emotion in his eyes, slightly narrowed in concentration as they move together, but no less focused on her and her alone.

There's an intensity to it at odds with how slow this coupling is, a sharpness despite how gently they're touching each other. It's a balm of sorts, the affectionate sweep of his hands and the unhurried movement of her body over his, the brush of her lips as she leans down to kiss him and ends up wrapped in his arms.

Her pleasure builds gradually, a knot tightening in her spine ever so slowly, but when he reaches between them and touches her, light explodes behind her closed eyes. Her release comes on with all the force of a hurricane, riding out the waves as he holds her steady, thrusting hard to prolong it for her and to find his own.

Eleanor collapses into his arms, their bodies slick with sweat, her hair damp against her forehead. His breath is ragged on her shoulder as he stretches up to kiss the exposed curve of her neck, and she hums her pleasure before slipping to his side in a boneless heap. "A day, a month, a year, a lifetime, right?" she asks softly, brushing her thumb over his cheekbone, his neatly trimmed beard soft under her fingers.

"A fucking lifetime, Eleanor. A fucking lifetime."

* * *

 **For a fic that was only ever supposed to be "a short one shot" this thing just kept writing itself. Something about these two just wouldn't (won't?) leave me be. I would have loved to keep living in this universe, but here is where the story ends. I *may* post some companion pieces I've been dreaming up if the muse (and time) cooperates. Thanks for reading!**


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